Location: Crawley, United Kingdom
Thales is a global technology leader with more than 83,000 employees on five continents. With over 7,500 people in the UK, operating across defence, space, aerospace, and digital security, we help build a future we can all trust. Thales supports the security and stability of our nation by providing extraordinary technology to our customers, as well as delivering social value to the UK with our products and services.
2027 AI Engineer Apprentice – Level 6 Machine Learning
Start Date: 06 September 2027
Salary: £24,000 per annum
Employee type: Permanent
Location: Crawley
Working Schedule: Monday – Friday, 37 hours a week (8 hours Monday – Thursday, 5 hours Friday)
Turn your curiosity into a career. If you’re passionate about artificial intelligence, eager to learn, and looking for a degree apprenticeship that combines academic study with exciting on-the-job experience, we’d love to hear from you.
Benefits of the programme:
- Earn a salary while studying for your qualification
- Gain hands‑on experience in a real AI and engineering environment
- Receive job‑specific training and development
- Achieve a recognised Level 6 qualification
- Secure a permanent role from the start of your apprenticeship
- Have your tuition fees fully paid
About the Role
As an AI Engineer Apprentice, you will develop the technical knowledge, practical skills and professional behaviours needed to design, build, test and deploy dependable AI‑enabled solutions.
Working as part of our AI and engineering community, you will contribute to live projects across the machine learning lifecycle, collaborating with software, data, systems and domain specialists to turn needs into secure, maintainable solutions.
Your responsibilities may include:
- Preparing, exploring and validating data for machine learning use cases
- Developing and evaluating machine learning models and AI‑enabled software components
- Writing clean, tested and documented code using appropriate engineering tools and practices
- Supporting model integration, deployment, monitoring and performance improvement
- Contributing to technical reviews, experiments and structured problem solving
- Working with experienced engineers and researchers on live projects
What You Will Learn
- Professional engineering behaviours, teamwork and industry best practice
- Programming, software engineering, version control and automated testing
- Data preparation, feature engineering and data quality techniques
- Machine learning methods, model selection, training and evaluation
- Deployment patterns, MLOps, monitoring and lifecycle management
- Cloud, compute and development tools used to deliver AI solutions
- Responsible AI, security, privacy, safety and regulatory considerations
- Structured approaches to troubleshooting, experimentation and continuous improvement
Apprenticeship Programme
You will study towards a Level 6 AI Engineer apprenticeship with QA, developing the knowledge, skills and behaviours required to build and apply artificial intelligence responsibly in an engineering environment.
The programme is delivered through a virtual learning model, combining:
- Live virtual lectures (28 days)
- Online learning resources
- Self‑directed study
This programme will take you through the AI lifecycle, from design and build, through to deployment and governance – providing a strong foundation for your role within Thales. The programme includes the Microsoft certified Azure AI Engineer Associate qualification, in addition to the Level 6 Machine Learning Engineer Apprenticeship qualification.
Entry Requirements
- A Levels
- Three A Levels Grade B or above in Maths
- At least one relevant subject (Physics, Computer Science, Software, ICT)
- Or a Level 4/5 apprenticeship in a similar subject
- GCSEs
- Minimum of five GCSEs at Grade 9-4 (A-C), including English and Maths
Benefits
- Competitive salary of £24,000 per annum
- Performance‑related pay uplifts
- Holiday entitlement of 201 hours a year (plus a company day and bank holidays)
- Contributory Company Pension
- Health Care Cash Plan
- Hybrid/flexible working options
- Employee assistance programme
- Learning and development support
- Employee discounts and wellbeing initiatives
- Life Cover
- 80 Hours Volunteering per year (first two years)
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