Lead MLOps Engineer

Job Title: Lead MLOps Engineer
Location: Preston. We offer a range of hybrid and flexible working arrangements - please speak to your recruiter about the options for this particular role
Salary: Circa £55k depending on skills and experience
What you’ll be doing:

• 
  
• Operationalise model and LLM deployment with CI/CD, governance, monitoring and promotion controls
  
• Build CI/CD pipelines for ML and LLM services using Gitlab runners
  
• Manage model lifecycle: versioning, promotion and rollback across environments
  
• Operate MLflow tracking and model registry
  
• Deploy inference services into OpenShift with monitoring and alerting
  
• Integrate secrets and credentials securely via Vault
  

Your skills and experiences:
Essential:

• 
  
• Knowledge of Kubernetes-based deployment ML lifecycle governance and observability
  
• Use of tools such as MLflow, GitLab CI/CD, OpenShift/Kubernetes, Vault, Prometheus/Grafana/Loki
  

Benefits:

As well as a competitive pension scheme, BAE Systems also offers employee share plans, an extensive range of flexible discounted health, wellbeing and lifestyle benefits, including a green car scheme, private health plans and shopping discounts - you may also be eligible for an annual incentive.

The Data team:

This is an opportunity to join a new part of the business, undertaking a new piece of work, introducing new technology into the wider BAE Business. Joining from the ground up, this is a chance to make your mark and the role your own. This role will provide the opportunity to grow the role & your responsibility into a wider scope or even specialise within a specific area.

Why BAE Systems?

This is a place where you’ll be able to make a real difference. You’ll be part of an inclusive culture that values diversity of thought, rewards integrity, and merit, and where you’ll be empowered to fulfil your potential. We welcome people from all backgrounds and want to make sure that our recruitment processes are as inclusive as possible. If you have a disability or health condition (for example dyslexia, autism, an anxiety disorder etc.) that may affect your performance in certain assessment types, please speak to your recruiter about potential reasonable adjustments.

Please be aware that many roles at BAE Systems are subject to both security and export control restrictions. These restrictions mean that factors such as your nationality, any nationalities you may have previously held, and your place of birth can restrict the roles you are eligible to perform within the organisation. All applicants must as a minimum achieve Baseline Personnel Security Standard. Many roles also require higher levels of National Security Vetting where applicants must typically have 5 to 10 years of continuous residency in the UK depending on the vetting level required for the role, to allow for meaningful security vetting checks.

Closing Date: 9th March 2026

We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible.