No10 AI Engineer

The Team:

The No10 data science team, 10DS, offers an unparalleled opportunity to develop your career personally and within the Civil Service. Formed in mid-2020, 10DS is here to radically improve the way in which key decisions are informed by data, analysis and evidence. We do this by:

• Enabling No10 to utilise the best available evidence by combining cutting-edge data science with clear, engaging communication throughout the policy and decision-making process, ensuring that the Prime Minister and staff are intelligent customers of analysis, and embedding a culture of evidence-informed policy
• Provoking positive change across central government through providing challenge and feedback, and collaborating across Whitehall to drive long-term systems change and collectively solve the most pressing policy challenges

We actively encourage applicants from a wide range of backgrounds, as we see the value in housing a wide range of skillsets across the team. Our current team members bring experience from a host of industries, including management consulting, technology, and academia.

The role:

As an AI engineer in Number 10 Data Science, you will build the AI systems that change how the centre of government works. You will own products end to end, from a problem raised by a policy or analytical user, through model and architecture choices, to a production-grade service deployed on our platform and used by real customers on live priorities. Your work will directly support PM policy and delivery priorities, and your customers will be senior ministers, the Prime Minister and Civil Service leaders.

You will work at the frontier of applied AI: putting the latest models to work on real government problems, building agentic systems that can reason over our data estate, and creating tooling that turns hard questions into evidence and insight on demand. You will work closely with colleagues across No10 and government to get this capability into the hands of the people making critical decisions, and to spread good practice across departments.

You will also help lead the cross-government data science and AI community, engaging a wide range of stakeholders to champion ambitious, responsible use of AI in the public sector. 10DS runs a strong programme of technological development drawing on AI and cloud computing, and you would be central to it.

10DS is strongly committed to learning and development, and is more interested in your aptitude and attitude than your pre-existing expertise. Significant on-the-job training can be provided for the right applicant.

Main responsibilities:

• Ship AI products that change how No10 and the wider Civil Service work, putting genuinely useful capability in the hands of senior users, up to and including ministers and the Prime Minister.
• Lead the push to put modern AI to work across government, getting the latest models into the hands of other departments for high-stakes tasks such as drafting policy advice, interrogating large evidence bases, and quantitative analysis, and building reusable patterns that let good practice spread fast without sacrificing rigour.
• Champion responsible and ethical AI practice: set the bar for how AI systems built in this team are evaluated, bounded, and documented, ensuring tools that reach ministers and senior officials are reliable, auditable, and designed with fairness and transparency at their core.
• Design and build a semantic layer over a large and varied data estate so that AI systems can match any question to the right data, drawing across internal data, the open web, and external providers.
• Stay at the frontier: track the fastest-moving developments in AI and translate promising new models and techniques into practical capability faster than the field moves.
• Build at the frontier of applied agentic AI: autonomous systems that plan their own approach to a question, gather evidence, run their own analysis, and return a fully reasoned, auditable answer, taken from prototype to production. The hard problems here, keeping a self-directing system reliable, bounded, and analytically sound, are open research questions you would help solve.

If you are interested but feel you don't yet meet every requirement, please apply. We value enthusiasm, aptitude for growth, and diversity of thought and experience, along with the skills and experience outlined.

You will be able to competently demonstrate:

• Hands-on experience building with AI (LLMs, agentic systems, ML), and the judgement to pick the right approach and prove it works through proper evaluation.

The ability to explain complex technical work clearly to senior, non-technical audiences and build trust across government.

Delivery of high-impact results at pace under pressure.

Comfort with ambiguity and competing priorities.

• A genuine drive to use AI for public benefit.

Essential Skills/Experience:

• Experience building AI applications
• Excellent understanding of Machine Learning and Deep Learning models
• An understanding of deploying and monitoring AI systems in a cloud environment
• Proficiency in Python
• Strong software engineering skills with a focus on building production-ready systems
• Skilled at in dynamic environments and navigating ambiguity, prioritising ruthlessly where necessary
• Ability to navigate complex, multi-stakeholder landscapes, driving progress and consensus amidst competing priorities and perspectives.

The following are desirable (but proficiency can be developed in post):

• Building AI agents, or products that rely on AI agents
• Experience delivering applications to production
• Experience with containerisation using Docker and Kubernetes
• Familiarity with CI/CD and tools like Github Actions and Terraform

On the job training can be provided, however pay will be commensurate with technical experience as per the DDaT allowance process.

Additional information:

Cabinet Office policy is that a minimum 60% of your working time should be spent at your principal workplace. For some roles, due to their nature and the business need, this may be up to 100%. Requirements to attend other locations for official business will also count towards this level of attendance.

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Delivering at Pace
• Communicating and Influencing
• Leadership
• Seeing the Big Picture

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Building AI applications
• Software engineering

• Learning and development tailored to your role.
• An environment with flexible working options.
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity.
• A Civil Service Pension which provides an attractive pension, benefits for dependants and employer contributions of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by one day per year up to a maximum of 30.

Job contact :

• Name : 10DS Recruitment
• Email : DataScienceRecruitment@no10.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : cabinetofficerecruitment.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk