Ocho
Contract AI Engineer
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Contract AI Engineer – Search & NLP
Location: Fully Remote – UK
Contract: Initial Contract
Start: ASAP / Immediate
Rate: Up to £600 per day DOE
Ocho is working with an innovative UK technology business that has an immediate requirement for an experienced AI Engineer with a strong background in search, retrieval and NLP.
This is a hands-on engineering role focused on building the search, information extraction and evaluation capabilities that sit underneath complex AI products.
We’re looking for someone who has gone beyond simply integrating LLM APIs and has real experience building and improving production-grade search, retrieval or NLP systems.
The Role
You’ll work closely with engineering, product and data teams to design, build and improve search and information extraction systems used across complex document sets.
The work will include:
- Designing and improving Elasticsearch / OpenSearch search solutions
- Building semantic and vector search using embeddings and vector databases
- Developing hybrid search combining keyword and semantic retrieval
- Improving search relevance through ranking, boosting, re-ranking and query optimisation
- Building query parsing, intent detection and query rewriting capabilities
- Developing NLP information extraction solutions including NER and classification
- Using LLMs for structured information extraction
- Designing prompts, schemas and guardrails for production AI workflows
- Building evaluation frameworks to measure search and extraction quality
- Tracking metrics including precision, recall, F1, nDCG, MRR and recall@k
- Improving indexing performance, search latency and caching
- Working with complex and potentially unstructured document datasets
- Building production-grade Python services and APIs
- Supporting deployment into secure or constrained environments
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What We’re Looking For
The strongest candidates will have a combination of search engineering, NLP and applied AI experience.
Ideally, you’ll have strong commercial experience across several of the following:
- Python
- Elasticsearch or OpenSearch
- Semantic and vector search
- Embeddings and vector databases
- pgvector, FAISS, Weaviate, Pinecone or similar
- Hybrid search and retrieval
- Search relevance tuning
- Query parsing, intent detection or query rewriting
- Named Entity Recognition (NER)
- Text classification
- LLM-based information extraction
- Prompt engineering and structured outputs
- Retrieval evaluation and benchmarking
- Precision / recall / F1 measurement
- RAG and modern retrieval architectures
- APIs, containers, Git and CI/CD
- Linux environments
You don’t need to tick every box.
The priority is finding an engineer who understands how to make search and retrieval systems genuinely better, can measure the impact of those changes, and is comfortable building production software rather than working purely at research or prototype level.
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Particularly Relevant Experience
Experience in any of the following would be highly advantageous:
- Elasticsearch / OpenSearch relevance tuning
- Dense + sparse / hybrid retrieval
- Cross-encoder re-ranking or learning-to-rank
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Domain-specific NER or classification
- Open-weight LLMs such as Llama, Mistral or Gemma
- Local LLM inference
- OCR or document extraction
- MLflow, Weights & Biases or similar MLOps tooling
- Deployment into secure, on-premise or air-gapped environments
- Defence, national security, government or other highly regulated environments
Security Clearance
Because of the nature of the end-client environment, applicants must be UK-based and eligible to obtain UK Security Clearance (SC).
Existing SC or DV clearance would be particularly advantageous.
Certain projects may also have additional nationality or security restrictions.
The Contract
This is an urgent requirement, and we’re particularly interested in speaking with contractors who are immediately available or able to start at short notice.
The role is fully remote across the UK, with rates of up to £600 per day depending on experience.
If you’re an AI Engineer, Search Engineer, NLP Engineer or Applied AI Engineer with strong experience across search, retrieval and NLP, get in touch with Aaron at Ocho for more information.
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