Applied AI scale-up
AI Operations Associate
Work alongside machine-learning engineers keeping AI products accurate, safe and useful in the real world — evaluating outputs, curating data and improving prompts.
£31,500 – £40,000
About the role
AI Operations is the human layer that keeps AI products honest. You will review model outputs against quality rubrics, label and curate training data, run structured evaluations before releases and flag failure patterns to the engineering team. Over time you will own prompt libraries and evaluation sets for a whole product area. It is detail-heavy work with a fast feedback loop, and it is one of the clearest entry points into the AI industry without a machine-learning degree. The role is based in Aberdeen on a hybrid pattern of two to three days on site, and the employer recruits actively from across the wider region.
About the employer
The employer is an applied AI scale-up building assistant tooling for regulated industries. The AI operations team sits between research and customers, and several current machine-learning engineers started in exactly this role. They run weekly paper-reading sessions open to everyone and fund AI and data certifications in full.
What you will be doing
- Evaluate model outputs against quality and safety rubrics
- Curate, label and quality-check datasets
- Run pre-release evaluations and document regressions
- Maintain and improve prompt libraries
- Summarise failure patterns for engineers and product managers
- Support customer escalations involving model behaviour
What they are looking for
- Exceptional attention to detail and clear written English
- Comfort working with spreadsheets and simple queries
- Genuine interest in how AI systems behave and fail
Nice to have
- Python basics
- Prompt engineering practice
- Any annotation or QA experience
Where this leads
Associate → Senior AI Operations → ML Engineer, AI Product or Evaluation Lead. Internal moves into engineering are common and actively supported.