Principal Machine Learning Team Lead

Principal Machine Learning Engineer / ML Team Lead

Location: Bristol (Hybrid – 3 days onsite per week)

Salary: Up to £

Employment: Permanent

Security Clearance: Must be eligible for UK DV clearance

The Opportunity

We're working with an innovative UK technology company that is expanding its Machine Learning capability and looking to appoint an experienced Principal Machine Learning Engineer / ML Team Lead.

This is an opportunity to work on technically challenging, real-world AI and ML projects, developing solutions that operate in demanding environments where reliability, performance, security and computational constraints are critical.

The company is investing heavily in its ML capability and is looking for someone who can combine deep hands-on technical expertise with technical leadership and team development.

This is not a purely managerial position. You'll remain closely involved in developing, training, evaluating and deploying ML models, while helping shape technical direction and supporting the growth of the wider engineering team.

What You'll Be Doing

• Providing technical leadership to a team of Machine Learning Engineers, supporting their development through mentoring, coaching and technical guidance.
• Leading the design, development, training and deployment of machine learning and deep learning models.
• Taking ownership of complex ML projects from initial research and experimentation through to production deployment.
• Driving applied research, evaluating new approaches and translating promising techniques into practical engineering solutions.
• Working on ML systems deployed in challenging environments, including Edge and embedded platforms with constrained computing resources.
• Developing and optimising models for accuracy, inference performance, latency and reliability.
• Establishing robust model evaluation, benchmarking and testing approaches.
• Supporting ML infrastructure, training pipelines, experiment tracking and deployment processes.
• Collaborating with software, hardware and systems engineers to integrate ML capabilities into wider technology platforms.
• Helping define technical standards, engineering best practices and the longer-term direction of the ML capability.

What We're Looking For

We're interested in experienced ML Engineers who have progressed into Principal, Staff, Lead or technical leadership positions, or who are ready to take that next step.

• Strong commercial experience developing, training and deploying machine learning or deep learning models.
• Excellent Python programming skills and a strong understanding of software engineering principles.
• Deep technical knowledge of machine learning, neural networks, model architectures and optimisation.
• Experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow or equivalent.
• Proven ability to take ML solutions from research or prototype stage into production.
• Experience providing technical leadership, mentoring engineers or taking ownership of complex engineering projects.
• Strong understanding of model evaluation, performance optimisation and production ML challenges.
• Ability to work collaboratively with multidisciplinary engineering teams.

Particularly interesting experience:

• Computer vision, object detection, sensor fusion or sequence modelling.
• Applied ML research and experimentation.
• Edge AI, embedded ML or deploying models onto constrained hardware.
• Model compression, quantisation, inference optimisation or distributed training.
• LLMs, foundation models, fine-tuning and model evaluation.
• GPU computing and large-scale model training.
• MLOps, MLflow, Docker, Kubernetes or cloud-based ML infrastructure.
• Previous experience leading or mentoring Machine Learning Engineers.

You don't need experience across every area. We're particularly interested in candidates with genuine depth in one or more ML disciplines and the ability to apply that expertise to challenging engineering problems.

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