Senior AI Engineer (Prototyping and Integration) - Department for Energy Security & Net Zero - SEO

Location

Aberdeen, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, London, Salford

About the job

Job summary

The Integrated Corporate Services (ICS) is a shared corporate service. It provides corporate services (HR, Finance, Digital, Commercial, Security and Estates) across the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ) and the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT).  

Our team of over 400 professionals will be leading the way in how these functions will be delivered in the future. Our ambition is to be the leading provider of integrated corporate services for government and set the standard for quality, efficiency, and innovation in our field. 

We offer great working benefits including a world-class pension, flexible working options and a career where your learning and development is taken seriously. We are enormously proud to be a Disability Confident Leader employer. We support candidates with adjustments throughout our recruitment process. Information about disability confidence and just some examples of the adjustments that you can request can be found in the reasonable adjustment section below.  

Find Out More 

You can also follow our LinkedIn Careers Page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/desnz-careers/  

Job description

The DESNZ Change & Transformation Directorate is shaping what it means to be a truly consumer-focused department, reimagining our operating model, organisational capabilities, systems, processes and structures to meet both immediate and long-term goals. A key part of that transformation is harnessing the power of AI. The AI Product Development Team is a new, discovery-led product team within the Change & Transformation Directorate. We take the department's highest-value AI ideas and shape them into well-understood problems and well-designed solutions, then direct the specialist capacity needed to build them.

Person specification

• Build rapid proofs of concept, agents, integrations and lightweight interfaces in house. 
• Work across conventional and low-code capability on the Microsoft stack, principally Power Platform, Copilot Studio and Azure or Python.
• Convert agreed use cases into technically sound delivery plans, and commission proofs of concept and minimum viable products where the build sits outside the team. 
• Provide the technical judgement behind the team's commissioning decisions: what is feasible, what it will take, and whether a proposal is technically sound before anyone is asked to build it. 
• Convene and coordinate the multi-disciplinary delivery teams, analysing the underlying systems and data, translating requirements into specifications and acceptance criteria, and holding pace and quality across contributing teams. 
• Connect into engineering peers to ensure collaboration and peer review.
• Work to departmental platform, security and architecture standards throughout, and hand prototypes over cleanly for production engineering. 

Essential Criteria

• Experience of building and shipping working software, including integrations and lightweight user interfaces, in a production or near-production environment.
• Practical capability across both a conventional stack and a low-code environment. For this post that means Power Platform, Copilot Studio and Azure or Python.
• Experience of building with AI capabilities, including agents, together with a clear understanding of what they can and cannot do reliably.
• Able to assess technical feasibility quickly, and to explain the trade-offs and risks to non-technical colleagues and senior stakeholders.
• Experience of translating requirements into specifications and acceptance criteria, and of assuring work delivered by other teams or suppliers.
• Experience of working to platform, security and architecture standards, and of handing work over cleanly for others to run.
• Experience of working in a multidisciplinary team alongside product, design and research colleagues.

Desirable Criteria

• Experience of working with linked administrative or personal data and the information governance constraints that come with it.
• Experience of commissioning or overseeing build delivered by suppliers.
• Experience of working in a discovery-led product team at pace.