Senior AI Engineer (Prototyping and Integration)

Job summary

The Integrated Corporate Services (ICS) is a shared corporate service. It provides corporate services (HR, Finance, Digital, Commercial, Security and Estates) across the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ) and the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT).

Our team of over 400 professionals will be leading the way in how these functions will be delivered in the future. Our ambition is to be the leading provider of integrated corporate services for government and set the standard for quality, efficiency, and innovation in our field.

We offer great working benefits including a world-class pension, flexible working options and a career where your learning and development is taken seriously. We are enormously proud to be a Disability Confident Leader employer. We support candidates with adjustments throughout our recruitment process. Information about disability confidence and just some examples of the adjustments that you can request can be found in the reasonable adjustment section below.

Find Out More

You can also follow our LinkedIn Careers Page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/desnz-careers/

Job description

The DESNZ Change & Transformation Directorate is shaping what it means to be a truly consumer-focused department, reimagining our operating model, organisational capabilities, systems, processes and structures to meet both immediate and long-term goals. A key part of that transformation is harnessing the power of AI. The AI Product Development Team is a new, discovery-led product team within the Change & Transformation Directorate. We take the department's highest-value AI ideas and shape them into well-understood problems and well-designed solutions, then direct the specialist capacity needed to build them.

Person specification

• Build rapid proofs of concept, agents, integrations and lightweight interfaces in house.
  
• Work across conventional and low-code capability on the Microsoft stack, principally Power Platform, Copilot Studio and Azure or Python.
  
• Convert agreed use cases into technically sound delivery plans, and commission proofs of concept and minimum viable products where the build sits outside the team.
  
• Provide the technical judgement behind the team's commissioning decisions: what is feasible, what it will take, and whether a proposal is technically sound before anyone is asked to build it.
  
• Convene and coordinate the multi-disciplinary delivery teams, analysing the underlying systems and data, translating requirements into specifications and acceptance criteria, and holding pace and quality across contributing teams.
  
• Connect into engineering peers to ensure collaboration and peer review.
  
• Work to departmental platform, security and architecture standards throughout, and hand prototypes over cleanly for production engineering.

Essential Criteria

• Experience of building and shipping working software, including integrations and lightweight user interfaces, in a production or near-production environment.
  
• Practical capability across both a conventional stack and a low-code environment. For this post that means Power Platform, Copilot Studio and Azure or Python.
  
• Experience of building with AI capabilities, including agents, together with a clear understanding of what they can and cannot do reliably.
  
• Able to assess technical feasibility quickly, and to explain the trade-offs and risks to non-technical colleagues and senior stakeholders.
  
• Experience of translating requirements into specifications and acceptance criteria, and of assuring work delivered by other teams or suppliers.
  
• Experience of working to platform, security and architecture standards, and of handing work over cleanly for others to run.
  
• Experience of working in a multidisciplinary team alongside product, design and research colleagues.

Desirable Criteria

• Experience of working with linked administrative or personal data and the information governance constraints that come with it.
  
• Experience of commissioning or overseeing build delivered by suppliers.
  
• Experience of working in a discovery-led product team at pace.

Behaviours

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

• Delivering at Pace
• Changing and Improving

Technical skills

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

• Prototyping (Level: Practitioner)
• Systems Integration (Level: Practitioner)
• Describe something you built to prove an idea quickly. Set out the technical choices you made and why, how you integrated it with existing systems and data, how you tested that it worked, and how you handed it over or decided to stop.

We only ask for evidence of these technical skills on your application form:

• Describe something you built to prove an idea quickly. Set out the technical choices you made and why, how you integrated it with existing systems and data, how you tested that it worked, and how you handed it over or decided to stop.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £43,765, Department for Energy Security & Net Zero contributes £12,678 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero offers a competitive mix of benefits including:

• A culture of flexible working, such as job sharing, homeworking and compressed hours.
• Automatic enrolment into the Civil Service Pension Scheme, with an employer contribution of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by 1 day per year up to a maximum of 30.
• An extensive range of learning & professional development opportunities, which all staff are actively encouraged to pursue.
• Access to a range of retail, travel and lifestyle employee discounts.

Office attendance

The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), an