Senior Applied AI Engineer (Defence Contractor)

Oxford Dynamics is a UK frontier technology company developing digital and physical AI systems for defence, national security, critical infrastructure, and other mission-critical environments. The Senior Applied AI Engineer will design, build, and deploy production-grade agentic AI systems, including multi-agent orchestration, model integration, retrieval, evaluation, and secure cloud, on-premises, and offline deployments.

Responsibilities:

• Build the systems themselves. You design and build multi-agent AI systems from the ground up, using frameworks such as LangGraph or Haystack where they help, and building the orchestration, state and tool-calling infrastructure underneath them when they do not
• Engineer for production. You write clean, tested, maintainable code and make sound systems-level decisions, treating reliability, latency and failure behaviour as first-class concerns
• Put models to work. You integrate large language and vision-language models into real reasoning, search, summarisation and task-execution pipelines, and build the retrieval, memory and guardrails that make them dependable
• Deploy where it is hard. You take systems into cloud, on-premises and, where required, fully offline environments, and engineer for the security and reliability constraints that come with each
• Own the full pipeline. You build production pipelines from data ingestion through to inference, owning the whole path rather than a slice of it
• Make confidence earned, not asserted. You build the evaluation, observability and guardrails that show how a system actually behaves, its agent behaviour, model performance and failure modes
• Set the technical bar. You act as a technical authority for agentic AI, taking technical ownership of the workstream, setting the design patterns and direction other engineers build to, and leaving behind systems and documentation the team can maintain after your engagement ends