Deputy Director, AI Engineering (Justice AI Unit) - MoJ - SCS1

Location

East Midlands (England), East of England, London (region), North East England, North West England, Scotland, South East England, South West England, Wales, West Midlands (England), Yorkshire and the Humber

About the job

Job summary

This is a National based role

Job description

The Justice AI Unit is an interdisciplinary team of AI specialists, designers, technologists, and operational experts working to embed responsible AI across the justice system.

We exist to enable the safe and ethical adoption of AI across the MoJ and its agencies, helping our people deliver faster, better and more human services.

Reporting into the Director of Justice AI Unit you will:

Strategic Leadership:

• Lead engineering across the Justice AI Unit, setting technical direction for delivery of AI-powered products at scale.

• Own decisions impacting thousands of users across the justice system, ensuring reliability, security, and fairness.

• Drive adoption of platform engineering best practices, particularly in Azure, ensuring scalable, resilient infrastructure.

• Translate advances in large language models into practical, deployable solutions that support justice outcomes.

Senior Stakeholder Engagement:

• Provide technical leadership for AI product development, ensuring products balance speed, safety, and user need.

• Build and scale applications powered by large language models, including decisions on cost, performance, and latency.

• Apply strong product judgement to weigh trade-offs between functionality, scalability, and user outcomes.

Team Leadership and Coordination:

• Lead and manage a team of engineers, ensuring they deliver innovative products in a fast-paced environment.

• Build a high-performance, mission-driven engineering culture with strong focus on collaboration and pragmatism.

• Coach and develop engineers, providing technical and career progression pathways.

Operational Excellence:

• Ensure security best practices in all engineering work, safeguarding sensitive data and systems.

• Oversee efficient resource planning, infrastructure scaling, and cost management.

• Ensure alignment between engineering delivery and MoJ digital/AI strategy.

Deputising for the Director of AI:

• Represent the Director in strategic forums, including cross-government AI working groups, high-level stakeholder engagements, and external conferences.

Essential Experience:

• Excellent leadership skills, with a proven ability to provide clear direction and coaching to high performing teams

• Strong knowledge and hands-on experience with platform engineering and scaling infrastructure, particularly on Azure.

• Deep expertise in building and delivering meaningful products, preferably at scale.

• Exceptional stakeholder skills, with an ability to act as a trusted advisor to senior stakeholders within and outside of the team, and develop strong relationships across organisational boundaries and external stakeholders

• Experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications, such as Open AI, Azure, Hugging Face

Person specification

For full details about the Role, Key Responsibilities and Person Specification, please download and review the Candidate Information pack

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Leadership
• Delivering at Pace
• Changing and Improving
• Managing a Quality Service