Principal Machine Learning Engineer (contract)

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Contract

Location: Bristol, UK

Reporting To: Ben Derrick

Compensation: £600 - £700 / day

Description

We’re building the next UK-headquartered engineering powerhouse.
There is a gulf between the needs of mission-focused organisations and the development and delivery of the critical technology they rely on. The consequences of this are felt acutely by underserved frontline operators, demanding a new breed of engineering enterprise to bridge this divide.
Rowden exists to meet this need. We design and build systems, infrastructure, and applications to deliver mission advantage to those working to protect the security of the UK and its allies. Rowden is setting a new standard in government technology provision: hyper-efficient engineering, better customer relationships, and rapid assimilation of commercial technology.

As our Machine Learning capability area continues to grow, we’re looking for a contract Principal ML Engineer to join our team in an interim-leadership capacity. In this role, you’ll have the opportunity to work on a broad range of challenging and interesting problems, from the rapid, highly agile research and proof of concepts through to the deployment of cutting-edge technology into operational systems for a diverse range of end users with important missions and a powerful need for the very best capability on offer. This may involve areas such as Radio Frequency Machine Learning Systems (RFMLS), Large Language Models (LLMs), deep neural networks, natural language processing, intelligent control systems, and deploying solutions to the far-edge in denied, disrupted, intermittent or lossy communication environments. 

With deep expertise across ML, software engineering, and DevOps, you'll lead the development of cutting-edge systems while ensuring trust, safety, and seamless integration. If you're a strategic thinker with a proven track record in technical leadership and a desire to work in an agile, mission-driven environment with an incredible group of highly motivated engineers this is your next challenge!

Key areas of responsibility

As a Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Rowden, you will be responsible for:

• Strategic Technical Leadership: Your role will be pivotal in defining and advancing our strategic roadmap for Machine Learning, ensuring we achieve our goals with innovation and precision.
• Architectural Vision and Best Practices: You'll be the visionary shaping our system architectures and setting the standard for engineering excellence within the Machine Learning discipline.
• Representing Rowden: You’ll provide critical, engaging, subject matter expert support to key stakeholder engagement activities including customer meetings, conferences and events where appropriate.
• Hands-On Technical Expertise: Actively engage in and contribute to building innovative machine learning solutions across a wide range of applications and technologies, from earlier stage research and rapid prototyping through to production deployment into operational environments. Tackling challenges at every stage of our process and every layer of our technology stack – from data capture, management, development, integration, test, evaluation, verification, validation through to deployment.
• Design Authority: Leading and providing assurance of design and development activity for trust, privacy, safety, security, compliance, high availability, performance, and resilience.
• Engineering Alignment: Represent our team in high-level engineering decisions, ensuring our projects are in sync with broader organisational objectives.
• Collaborative Project and Product Delivery: Work closely with, and be part of, our customer-facing teams to deliver seamless and standout project and product experiences.
• Elevating Engineering Standards: Organise and lead engineering initiatives that uplift our standards, motivate our team, and drive ongoing improvements.
• Technology Awareness and Adaptation: Stay on top of academic and industry trends, especially in Machine Learning and far-edge technologies, ensuring our solutions remain cutting-edge.
• Mentorship and Team Growth: Passionately mentor and guide team members, fostering their professional growth and career development. 

Key skills, experience and behaviours

We are looking for someone passionate about technology who actively invests in their technical skills and abilities. You’ll already have a wealth of experience, but will be looking for a new opportunity to get heavily involved in technical solution implementations, continuing to develop your technical capabilities within one of the UK’s fastest growing SMEs.  We are looking for a person with:

• Extensive Technical Experience: You have thorough experience in designing, developing and deploying complex Machine Learning based solutions, and can demonstrate significant contribution to large-scale projects as an architect or key individual contributor.
• Deep Technical Expertise across Machine Learning and Software Engineering: You have deep technical knowledge of fundamental machine learning approaches with a strong foundation in software engineering and DevOps best practices. You should have familiarity with deep learning and classical ML frameworks (such PyTorch, TensorFlow, containerisation (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes) and programming languages (e.g. Python, Go). 
• Holistic Delivery Track Record: You excel at implementing and delivering comprehensive solutions, integrating various technologies and ensuring seamless operation: from initial ideation to deployment and beyond. 
• Assurance Experience: You possess a strong background or awareness of the assurance of Machine Learning components or systems for applications where trust, safety and security are paramount to the successful exploitation of this disruptive technology to delivering real value to our end users.
• Decision-Making Leadership: You've led Machine Learning and software evaluation and decision-making processes, ensuring the best appropriate technical choices are made for your organisation.
• Strategic Roadmap Development: You've successfully crafted or contributed to engineering roadmaps that align with product strategies and business goals.
• Leadership and Management Experience: You’ve supported high-potential engineers providing them with clear direction, mentoring and coaching to enhance their professional development. 

Highly Desirable Knowledge and Experience
Because of the specific tech stack we use, familiarity with the following would be advantageous:

• Redis and SQL databases, as well as working knowledge of AWS services.
• GitHub for version control, Docker and Kubernetes for deployment and integration, and Jira for collaboration.
• Experience with deploying models on edge devices, particularly the Nvidia Jetson family (e.g., TX2, Orin) and specialised hardware like the Deepwave AIR-T. 
• Familiarity with MLOps pipelines, particularly using ClearML, and monitoring tools such as Grafana.
• Ability to work across edge hardware and cloud environments, ensuring seamless integration and performance.
• Some knowledge of deep reinforcement learning

About you

We aren't looking for a specific work history background, i.e. you might come from a more academic post-doc background or, have more experience of software development in industry. Primarily we are looking for someone who has the requisite foundation knowledge and understanding of ML, and how to apply it to real-world problems, who is excited to apply it to novel challenges. 

One of our core values relates to embracing uncertainty. We are therefore looking for someone who is willing to work on difficult problems, comfortable in the knowledge that solutions will not be easy and that there may not sometimes even be a solution. While an ability to work independently is important, you will also be surrounded by a team of ML engineers to support you on this work. 

You should be comfortable working in line with agile principles, for example code reviews and agile ceremonies. As engineers we aim to iterate quickly, developing prototypes that can test the suitability of theoretical ideas. While we often don’t aim to produce production ready systems from day one, we write code to a professional standard, with the consideration that one day this could be developed into a production ready system.  

Working at Rowden

We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are!  We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid-working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role).  We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants.  Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible.  Finally, if you feel that you don’t meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we’d still love to hear from you!