Senior Applied AI Engineer (Defence Contractor)

Role: Senior Applied AI Engineer (Defence Contractor)

Rate: £700–£900 per day, dependent on experience

Location: Oxford / London

Engagement: Contract, outside IR35: initial 6-month term with strong likelihood of extension

Start: Immdediate start. Hybrid, with regular time on site in Oxford or London

Security clearance:You must be eligible for UK security clearance (BPSS and SC. We require applicants to hold UK passport and 5 years of continuous UK residency.

We can sponsor clearance for the right candidate, but given the contract nature of this role we strongly prefer candidates who already hold an active, transferable SC; DV is an advantage. If you are not eligible, we will not be able to progress your application.

A note from the Founders

Oxford Dynamics is at an inflection point.

We build frontier AI for environments where the cost of a wrong decision is high: defence and national security, critical infrastructure, and commercial organisations making high-stakes decisions on complex data. We are growing fast, and the constraint on how fast is no longer ideas or opportunity. It is whether the systems we ship are good enough for the people who stake decisions on them.

That is where you come in. We need engineers who can build the systems this mission depends on, and build them to a standard that holds when the answer has to be right. You will be trusted to own real systems end-to-end, held to a single high standard, and judged on one thing above all: whether what you ship earns the confidence people place in it when the decision matters.

If you are the kind of engineer who builds rather than assembles, who wants your work measured by whether it holds up in production rather than whether it demos well, and who wants to see the direct line from your code to systems people depend on, we would love to hear from you.

Who We Are

Founded in 2019, Oxford Dynamics is a fast-growing UK frontier technology company developing both digital and physical AI systems built to operate in dynamic, mission-critical environments.

At the core of everything we build is AVIS™ (A Very Intelligent System), our orchestration platform: the intelligence layer that fuses multi-modal data, including text, imagery, telemetry and sensor feeds, so operators can interrogate complex information at speed and make better decisions under pressure. AVIS™ powers our digital decision products, such as ORION for multi-source decision-to-effect, and it powers our physical platforms.

We work where wrong decisions can be catastrophic. We partner with defence, security and private sector organisations internationally to bring frontier AI into the environments where it matters most, whether that is protecting nations, infrastructure and lives, or transforming how commercial organisations reason over their data and make high-stakes decisions.