• Locations

  Manchester, Greater Manchester

• Salary

  Up to £540 per annum + REMOTE

• Sector

  Development, Architecture & Testing, Technology

• Type

  Temporary

Python Engineer
Salary – £540 per day (Outside IR35)
Contract – 6-Month (potential for extension)
Work location – Remote (Quarterly Travel to Edinburgh)

We are supporting a major public sector organisation with the recruitment of an experienced Python Engineer to join an AI-driven automation team on an initial 6-month contract. This role is Outside IR35, offers £540 per day, and is fully remote, with quarterly on-site collaboration days in Edinburgh.

Overview

The successful engineer will play a key role in providing hands-on technical leadership within an agile development team building advanced automation capabilities. The team is focused on leveraging document processing, computer vision, and machine learning/LLMs to improve high-volume, low-complexity workflows across a national-level digital registration domain.

The work involves enhancing existing automation systems, conducting R&D into new AI-driven solutions, and helping to embed these tools into wider digital platforms.

Key Responsibilities

• Enhance and extend an existing productionised automation service using OCR, Object Detection, and LLM-based AI.
• Develop system components supporting deed document OCR and LLM analysis for automation decision-making.
• Conduct research spikes to expand the scope, accuracy, and reliability of automation workflows.
• Provide high-quality support for operational services, ensuring stability and troubleshooting across multiple environments.
• Contribute to R&D initiatives aimed at developing innovative automation approaches.
• Produce clean, maintainable, and sustainable software following best engineering practices.
• Participate in Agile ceremonies, pairing/mobbing, code reviews, and collaborative engineering activities.
• Maintain effective monitoring, dashboards, deployment pipelines, and support processes.
• Ensure all developed software meets non-functional requirements (security, accessibility, performance, maintainability, etc.).
• Mentor team members where appropriate and actively contribute to technical knowledge-sharing.
• Support disaster recovery assurance activities, including planned weekend testing events.

Essential Skills & Experience
AI/ML & Computer Vision

• Hands-on experience with OCR, Object Detection, and LLM implementation.
• Strong knowledge of ML/AI libraries:
  • Transformers/Hugging Face
  • PyTorch
  • OpenCV, PIL/Pillow
  • YOLO object detection frameworks

Python Engineering

• Excellent Python (3.9+) skills: OOP, decorators, context managers, async/await.
• Strong understanding of algorithms, optimisation, debugging, and error handling.

Data Processing

• Proficiency with Pandas, NumPy.
• Experience with SQLAlchemy or psycopg2 for database interaction.
• Boto3 for AWS automation and service integration.

AWS (Within Defined Technical Architecture)

• Lambda development and event handling.
• S3 operations including multipart uploads and event notifications.
• CloudWatch for monitoring and debugging.
• IAM and security best practices.
• CDK for IaC deployments.
• Experience with SQS and containerised deployments via EKS/ECS/Kubernetes.

API Development

• FastAPI for REST endpoints and model-serving.
• Requests library for external integrations.
• Experience with JWT/OAuth authentication flows.

Software Engineering Practices

• High-quality AI/ML software delivery within collaborative teams.
• Experience in serverless and service-based architectures.
• Ability to communicate complex AI concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

Development Methodologies

• Agile (Scrum/Kanban).
• XP engineering practices (TDD, pair programming).
• Strong understanding of IaC frameworks.

Desirable Experience

• Custom model architecture development.
• Advanced LLM fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA, parameter-efficient methods).
• Multi-modal AI systems (text, image, structured data).
• RLHF and alignment techniques.
• ML workflow orchestration (Airflow, Dagster).
• Experiment tracking (MLflow, Weights & Biases).
• Real-time model serving, A/B testing, and modern ML deployment strategies.

This is an initial 6-month contract, with the possibility of extension, working for our Public Sector client in Scotland. The role is paying £540 per day Outside IR35 and is fully remote, with quarterly travel to Edinburgh for team collaboration.

Morgan Hunt is a multi-award-winning recruitment Business for interim, contract and temporary recruitment and acts as an Employment Agency in relation to temporary vacancies. Morgan Hunt is an equal opportunities employer, job suitability are assessed on merit in accordance with their skills, qualifications and abilities to perform the relevant duties required in a particular role.