Senior Software Engineer 1 (MLOps)

Contract: 18-month fixed-term contract from signing (running to at least January 2028), with a view to extending or moving to permanent as a second round of programme funding is confirmed.

Location: Oxford, hybrid preferred, though we'd consider fully remote for the right person.

Oxfida (formerly Aioi R&D Lab – Oxford) is an AI R&D company based in Oxford, on a mission to harness AI to understand, predict, and manage risk, helping build a safer, more resilient society.

We sit at the intersection of academia and industry, working with Oxford's professors and researchers alongside commercial partners, and combining that expertise with real-world risk data at global scale to turn frontier research into AI that actually ships rather than just gets published.

Our work spans AI for insurance underwriting and claims, AI risk governance, privacy-preserving technologies for agentic AI, and quantum optimisation, alongside partnership projects on nature and supply chains and the emerging challenges nobody's solved yet.

We build AI products and solutions for insurers, businesses, and public-sector organisations worldwide, and run innovative research projects that push these technologies further, helping people make better decisions in an uncertain world.

Trusted AI. Built in Oxford.

You'd join a small, technically strong engineering team, led by an experienced Technical Lead, building the infrastructure that CODAS runs on: secure cloud infrastructure, ML model serving and training pipelines, and agentic development tooling. This is a hands-on infrastructure and platform role with genuine room to grow into more senior technical responsibility as the programme scales.

We're not expecting you to already have deep experience across every part of this stack. We're looking for a strong engineer with solid fundamentals, who picks up new tools fast and cares about building things that work reliably and responsibly.

Responsibilities

* Help design, build, and run the cloud infrastructure behind a privacy-preserving AI research programme, working under the Technical Lead.

* Build model hosting and training infrastructure, secure data storage, and agentic development tooling that the research tracks depend on.

* Write clean, well-tested, maintainable code, and contribute to shared engineering standards, CI/CD, and documentation.

* Support integration with partner environments and research workflows, troubleshooting issues as they come up.

* Get stuck into technical trade-offs, ask good questions, and learn fast as tools and requirements evolve.

Knowledge, Experience and Qualifications

* 5+ years of commercial software experience, with a track record of shipping maintainable code in a team.

* Solid Python, including the core data/ML libraries (pandas, numpy, scikit-learn) and good instincts on structure, testing, and packaging.

* Practical cloud infrastructure experience, including deploying services, managing storage, and working with access controls. AWS preferred, but strong experience with another provider counts.

* Familiarity with Kubernetes and Helm, and comfort with CI/CD, version control, and containerisation as everyday tools.

* Some exposure to ML infrastructure or data engineering, such as training pipelines, model serving, experiment tracking, or data pipelines.

* The ability to explain what you've built, why, and what trade-offs you made.

Bonus points: LLM serving/fine-tuning (even personal projects), agentic AI frameworks (LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI), Kubeflow/KServe, GitOps/IaC (Flux, Terraform), or an interest in privacy-preserving techniques.

Why join us

* A genuinely hands-on infrastructure role on a high-profile sovereign AI programme, not a ticket queue.

* Room to grow: the stack isn't fully fixed, so there's real scope to shape it and grow your seniority alongside the programme.

* Work directly with Oxford's research network and an ambitious international partner group, not several layers removed from the interesting problems.

* This is a fixed-term contract tied to CODAS's current funding cycle, but there's a genuine intent to extend and move roles to permanent as a second funding round is confirmed. It isn't a contract designed to end