Machine Learning Engineer; Mid to Principal

We’re building the UK's next generation engineering powerhouse, providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience.

We specialise in turning advances in sensing, AI, and communications into operational capability for the edge, where connectivity may be degraded or denied. Our work focuses on accelerating the deployment of technology, improving decision-making for frontline teams, and protecting people and critical assets in demanding environments.

Headquartered in Bristol, Rowden employs around 200 people and operates over 20,000 square feet of engineering and manufacturing facilities. We have a growing international footprint and are one of Europe’s fastest-growing engineering businesses.

We are growing our ML team and hiring across mid, senior, lead and principal levels. We are looking for AI builders; you will be working on developing and deploying AI systems to solve complex problems that have real-world impact. You’ll join an existing ML team that works in close collaboration with software, hardware and systems teams to get useful AI into the hands of users.

Our ML team works end-to-end, from R&D to deployment, across traditional ML, deep learning, data engineering, foundation models and LLM/agentic systems. We are now hiring across a broad range of ML skills, including model training, evaluation, optimisation, infrastructure and deployment.

As an ML Engineer at Rowden, you will contribute to, own or lead development effort on projects and products, depending on your experience and level. You will work from applied research through to production, developing and deploying AI systems that solve complex problems with real-world impact. Our work is broad, spanning edge and embedded deployment, model evaluation, performance optimisation, data pipelines, large-scale training and ML infrastructure all focused on bringing useful AI capability to edge and embedded environments.

We are building a team with complementary strengths.

No prior defence experience is required. We’re interested in people who’ve built and deployed AI systems in demanding environments and are passionate about delivering tangible value to end users, whatever the sector.

This role offers hybrid working with a minimum of 3 days per week on-site at our Bristol HQ.

Candidates must be eligible for SC clearance.

More information about security clearance is available here:

Whilst we have advertised a salary band, for senior level roles and above, compensation is tailored to the scope of the role and the specific experience a candidate brings. For this role, we encourage applicants from outside of the advertised salary band to apply. We will discuss compensation openly at the first stage of the process and can share an indicative range before either side invests significant time.

• Own and ship ML in production: take ideas from R&D to robust, maintainable deployments—often onto edge or embedded hardware.
• Train and adapt models: work on model development, fine-tuning, evaluation and optimisation for real-world use cases.
• Work at scale where needed: run and improve training and inference workloads across GPUs, including multi-GPU or multi-node environments, to support models that can perform reliably in constrained settings.
• Improve performance: profile, optimise and debug ML systems across model code, data pipelines, inference stacks and hardware constraints.
• Own evaluation quality: design evaluation pipelines, benchmarks, test sets and feedback loops that help us understand model behaviour before and after deployment.
• End-to-end ownership: data collection/curation, feature engineering, model training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• MLOps/LLMOp…