Overview

Machine Learning Engineer

We’re looking for a passionate and skilled Machine Learning Engineer who’s excited by the opportunity to build real-world solutions that make a genuine difference. If you thrive in a collaborative environment, enjoy solving complex problems with data, and want your work to have a direct and visible impact — this could be the perfect next step in your career.

Contract: Permanent

Salary: London – Circa £70,000 (DOE); Manchester – Circa £62,000 (DOE)

Working hours: 35 hours per week, full-time

Reporting to: Machine Learning Lead

Location: London Docklands or Manchester City – Our permanent hybrid policy sees us all working at least four days across a fortnight in the office.

At the Financial Ombudsman Service, we’re on an exciting journey to redefine what modern, efficient, and accessible alternative dispute resolution looks like. Our mission is to set the gold standard for customer-focused service in a rapidly evolving financial landscape.

Over the past few years, we’ve embraced bold changes to enhance the customer experience and strengthen our financial sustainability. With a newly formed Executive team at the helm, we’re entering a transformative new chapter—driven by ambition, innovation, and a commitment to moving fast and delivering real impact.

Our Intelligent Automation team is at the heart of this transformation. We’re harnessing the power of AI and Generative AI to unlock smarter, faster, and more scalable solutions across the business.

We’re looking for someone with a proven track record in developing and deploying machine learning solutions—someone who’s ready to take our NLP and Gen AI capabilities to the next level. In this role, you’ll be:

• Designing and building Gen AI application stacks

• Scaling and maintaining ML pipelines and data transformation workflows

• Driving ML Ops excellence across the board

You’ll collaborate closely with architects, senior developers, product owners, and analysts—shaping requirements, influencing solution design, and contributing to architectural decisions. You’ll play a key role in sprint planning, owning user stories, and estimating work that directly impacts our business teams.

This is more than just a technical role—it’s a chance to solve real-world problems using data, automation, and AI. You’ll work hand-in-hand with stakeholders across the organisation, sharing your expertise, building documentation, and helping shape the future of intelligent automation at the Service.

Key responsibilities

• Assess and clarify requirements to provide estimate of the work.

• Working within a distributed team, delivering high quality solution

• Delivering LLM and Gen AI based automations that supports the business team in enhancing the customer journey

• Maintaining our existing machine learning pipelines

• Identifying opportunities for Continuous Improvement and optimizations of existing solutions

• Input to overall sprint planning and product backlog creation/maintenance.

Minimum criteria

• Solid programming experience in Python, as well as solid understanding of programming concepts, algorithms and cloud concepts

• Previous experience in solution design and knowledge of architecture frameworks and patterns

• Developing serverless pipelines in Azure, AWS or GCP (Azure preferred) and building data transformation pipelines using SQL and No SQL DB

• Building and maintaining CI/CD pipeline in Jenkins, Azure DevOps or GitHub actions and ML Ops pipeline in Azure ML, Azure AI Foundry, SageMaker or Vertex AI. IaC – Bicep, ARM, Terraform

• Have a good understanding of different machine learning techniques and ability to explain the methods in detail (regression, clustering, decision trees, reinforcement learning, gradient boosting, CNN, RNN, LSTM, Attention Models, Encoder and Decoder, Transformers, Vector semantics)

• Previous experience in developing Gen AI applications.

• Ability to communicate technical concepts and analytical outputs to a diverse set of stakeholders.

• Being able to provide estimates against organisational requirements relating to cost and development tasks

Tech stack

• Azure Data Factory, Logic Apps

• SQL, Cosmos DB

• Azure Batch, Azure Functions

• Azure Dev Ops – CI/CD, Bicep templates

• Azure AI services – Azure AI Foundry, Azure ML, Azure Open AI, Azure Doc Intelligence, Azure Speech to Text

• Copilot Studio, D365, M365 Copilot

• Python, C#

Why Financial Ombudsman Service?

We are a values led organisation. Our values define our culture, influence our decisions, and underpin our vision and strategy. They set out how we play our PART through Purpose, Ambition, Respect and Trust. You can learn more about our values here: https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/who-we-are/aims-values

Benefits

• 25 days holiday entitlement, with the option to buy extra or sell days

• Generous pension

• Various Family Friendly Policies, including enhanced maternity pay, carers and dependants leave

• Employer provided benefits such as Private medical insurance, virtual GP, Critical illness cover, Life assurance cover, to name a few

• Choice of voluntary benefits including Technology scheme, Cycle to work scheme, Will-writing service amongst others

• Employee Assistance Programme

• Extensive opportunities for personal and career development

• Nationwide gym membership discounts, and a fully equipped on-site gym open 24/7 in London

• Extensive Well-being resources including on-site therapists (London office only)

• Beautiful and bright London office looking over the Thames and near to mainline stations

• Our Manchester office is 7 minutes’ walk from the Oxford Road station

• Our employee led networks (a couple of examples being our Women\'s Network, Carers network, and Neurodiverse Network) do fantastic work in educating and raising awareness across a range of experiences and support us in being an inclusive employer and a great place to work. You can get involved, too!

How to apply?

• Please upload your CV, which should highlight your relevant skills and experience.

This advert will close at Midnight on Sunday, 5th October 2025

Due to high application numbers this advert may end earlier than the date specified, so please don't delay and submit your application asap.

A full job profile is available on request and will be provided to candidates shortlisted to the first stage of the recruitment process.

We’re proud to be an inclusive employer

We view diversity as fundamental to our success and welcome applications from underrepresented groups across all communities.

We’re committed to being a great place to work– attracting and developing people from the widest possible range of backgrounds. We want everyone to perform at their best and feel able to be themselves. We understand that if we’re diverse and inclusive, we’ll better understand different perspectives, which is fundamental to our job resolving financial complaints.

We welcome applications from Black and other ethnic minority candidates, and female candidates, for all positions and particularly so for senior leader positions as they are under-represented within the Financial Ombudsman Service at this level.

We are proud to be a Disability Confident Leader. This means that we will put disabled candidates entering under the scheme through to the next stage of the recruitment process should they meet the minimum criteria for a role. A minimum criterion needs to be measurable from reviewing a candidate’s CV/supporting statement. Exceptions may apply if due to the volume of applications, we are not able to interview all eligible candidates who qualify under the scheme. If you would like to speak to a member of our team about any reasonable adjustments you need, please email hrsupport@financial-ombudsman.org.uk and let us know your preferred method of contact.

Find out more

Check out below channels to find out more about everyday life at the Financial Ombudsman Service – and don’t forget to follow us while you’re there!

• LinkedIn: Financial Ombudsman Service

• Our careers page: https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/who-we-are/join-us

Good luck with your application!