SC Cleared Machine Learning Engineer

Job Title: Machine Learning Engineer 

Location: Bristol / Hybrid (2-3 days on-site)

Clearance Required: Active UK SC Clearance and British Citizen

Day Rate: £600 Outside IR35 – 6 month contract

The Role

We are supporting our client in the defence sector to build next-generation systems that process complex, real-world visual data in real time. We need an ML Engineer who specializes in computer vision to help move models from experimental codebases into rugged, production-ready systems.

You’ll be working with everything from object detection and tracking to multi-spectral imaging, deploying models that operate reliably in high-stakes environments.

What You’ll Do

• Build & Optimize: Design, train, and deploy deep learning models for object detection, segmentation, and tracking.

• Spatial Awareness: Implement and optimize SLAM algorithms to enable real-time mapping and localization for autonomous platforms.

• Scale: Optimize computer vision pipelines to run efficiently on edge devices and constrained hardware.

• Productionize: Wrap research-grade models into clean, maintainable, and scalable production code.

What We’re Looking For

• Core Stack: Strong programming skills in Python and deep familiarity with PyTorch.

• CV & Spatial Expertise: Hands-on experience building computer vision models and working with SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) frameworks.

• Engineering Focus: Experience with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and writing production-grade code.

• Must have prior experience in Defence or Government related work.

• You must hold active SC clearance and be a British citizen.

Nice to Have

• Experience optimizing models for edge hardware (TensorRT, ONNX).

• Familiarity with C++ for performance-critical vision and SLAM pipelines.

• Experience handling synthetic data generation or working with imperfect, low-resolution datasets.