Senior Applied AI Engineer

<h3 id="about-the-role" data-lfile-container="5d0e7d02-a82a-4f72-b339-d4dd8e167a5f" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">About the role</h3> <p>Scale's Global Public Sector team is focused on using AI to address critical challenges facing the public sector around the world. As a Senior Applied AI Engineer, you'll own the AI behaviour of production systems our clients depend on, including the agents, evaluations, and backend integration behind them. You'll lead delivery for your workstream and act as the technical point of contact for clients on how their AI performs on live data.</p> <h3 id="what-youll-do">What you'll do</h3> <ul> <li>Own the AI layer of production systems for public sector clients, including agents, model integration, and the backend services they run on</li> <li>Build production agents from established architectural patterns, with reliable tool calling, guardrails, and observability</li> <li>Select and adapt established evaluation methods, and design new evaluations for client-specific risks</li> <li>Apply context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, model adaptation, or inference optimisation</li> <li>Investigate regressions in the systems you own, lead root-cause analysis, and implement preventative changes</li> <li>Lead project planning for your workstream and manage client expectations on scope, risk, and delivery</li> <li>Codify recurring client work into reusable tooling, evaluation components, or guidance that other engineers adopt</li> <li>Mentor engineers through code review, pairing, and delegated ownership</li> </ul> <h3 id="what-we-look-for">What we look for</h3> <ul> <li>Backend engineering experience, with a track record of taking AI/ML systems into production and keeping them reliable</li> <li>Ownership of the AI behaviour of a production system end to end, rather than delivering a component scoped by another team</li> <li>Hands-on evaluation design that ties model behaviour to real-world outcomes, used to catch regressions</li> <li>Comfo