Principal AI/LLM Engineer

Job Title: Principal AI/LLM Engineer

Location : Rochester, Kent.

Salary: Circa £75,000 depending on experience and skills

What you’ll be doing:

• Architecture & Design Authority – Define / maintain the reference architecture for the BAE ES UK AI/LLM infrastructure across on-prem GPU clusters, virtualized environments.
• Experience in Engineering & Deployment – Deploy and maintain LLM inference, Implement RAG pipelines, Build CI/CD for AI models
• Optimisation & Monitoring of the AI stack
• Security, Compliance & Governance – Work closely with IT Security, Data Governance, and Architecture Boards to ensure compliance with GDPR, BAE Global Cyber Security Standards, SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA (if applicable)
• Mentoring other staff members
• Presenting to senior leadership Team

Your skills and experiences:

Essential:

• Proven experience deploying AI/ML platforms in enterprise/on-prem environments
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, Docker, and infrastructure automation (Terraform, Helm, Ansible)
• Good experience with LLM frameworks (Hugging Face, vLLM, DeepSpeed, LangChain, Ray)
• Familiarity with message queues, API gateways, and service meshes for scalable inference environments
• Proven programming skills in Python; comfortable with concepts such as Bash, YAML, and CI pipelines

Benefits:

As well as a competitive pension scheme, BAE Systems also offers employee share plans, an extensive range of flexible discounted health, wellbeing and lifestyle benefits, including a green car scheme, private health plans and shopping discounts – you may also be eligible for an annual incentive.

The Electronic Systems IT team:

BAE Systems, Electronic Systems IT (UK) based in Rochester have a strategic objective to rapidly expanding our use of AI over the coming years. To assist with this objective, we require a Principal AI/LLM Engineer to join our IT department.

The Principal AI/LLM Engineer will serve as both a implementer and technical authority for our AI infrastructure. You will architect, deploy, tune, and monitor our Large Language Model (LLM) and AI stack across primarily on-premise environments with selective cloud integrations.

This role spans MLOps and platform engineering, and implements AI governance, ensuring our AI capabilities are secure, performant, compliant, and aligned to long-term enterprise strategy.

Why BAE Systems?

This is a place where you’ll be able to make a real difference. You’ll be part of an inclusive culture that values diversity of thought, rewards integrity, and merit, and where you’ll be empowered to fulfil your potential. We welcome people from all backgrounds and want to make sure that our recruitment processes are as inclusive as possible. If you have a disability or health condition (for example dyslexia, autism, an anxiety disorder etc.) that may affect your performance in certain assessment types, please speak to your recruiter about potential reasonable adjustments.

Please be aware that many roles at BAE Systems are subject to both security and export control restrictions. These restrictions mean that factors such as your nationality, any nationalities you may have previously held, and your place of birth can restrict the roles you are eligible to perform within the organisation. All applicants must as a minimum achieve Baseline Personnel Security Standard. Many roles also require higher levels of National Security Vetting where applicants must typically have 5 to 10 years of continuous residency in the UK depending on the vetting level required for the role, to allow for meaningful security vetting checks.

Closing Date: 23rd March 2026

We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible. 

#LI-SH1

#LI-Onsite