Freelance Senior AI Engineer

ROLE DETAILS: Level: Lead Start Date: December Duration: 6 months Day Rate: Dependent on experience Weekly hours: 5 days/ week Location: Hybrid, 2 days a week in London   We're looking for a Senior AI Engineer to help us reimagine a function of government as part of an agentic ecosystem. You'll join a small multidisciplinary team of designers, researchers and engineers, working closely with civil servants and the department's own technical teams. The work is exploratory. We will learn by building and iterating, leaning on emerging best practices and patterns. We need someone who can build working prototypes quickly, while thinking deeply about the implications of technical decisions.   KEY SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE MUST HAVES: - Design and build prototypes that expose services to agents through APIs, MCP servers and agent to agent protocols - Design and build agentic systems end to end, including orchestration, tool integrations, and memory and state - Build guardrails, evaluations and monitoring to check agents act safely and correctly - Work with designers and researchers to test agent-led journeys with real users - Advise on technical feasibility, risks and standards, in plain language - Turn prototypes into patterns, documentation and code that other government teams can reuse NICE TO HAVE: - Substantial software engineering experience, with recent hands-on work building LLM-based applications or agents - Strong knowledge of tool use, agent frameworks and orchestration, and protocols such as MCP, and API design - Practical experience with guardrails, evaluation, testing and monitoring of AI systems - Sound judgement on security, privacy and safety risks, including prompt injection and misuse - Comfort working in fast, uncertain early-stage work, and explaining technical trade-offs to non-technical people LOCATION You will need to be able to work from our offices (London) for a minimum of two days a week. 1. Application Please attach your CV, plus a portfolio or any work you would like to also share. 2. Initial screening call A short conversation to cover the basics — your timezone, working languages, availability, and a chance for you to ask early questions about the role and how we work. 3. Technical interview (~60 minutes) A deeper conversation about your technical background and experience. We’ll talk through how you’ve approached real problems, the decisions you’ve made, and how you’d apply that thinking to the work at IF. 4. Ways of working interview (~45–60 minutes) A conversation about how you collaborate, communicate, and work with others — including how you operate in an advisory capacity with clients and teams. We’ll aim to keep you updated at every stage and let you know the outcome promptly after each step.