r/cscareerquestionsuk

Saw a job post earlier for an “AI Forensics / Deepfake Detection Intern” that honestly rubbed me the wrong way.

They wanted:

• MSc preferred
• Strong Python skills
• pandas/numpy
• writing automation scripts
• handling AI training datasets
• 25+ hours a week
• 6 month commitment
• working alongside PhD researchers on production systems

Pay: unpaid.

Not even minimum wage. Just “you’ll get experience and portfolio work”.

Maybe I’m out of touch, but if someone’s work is actively helping build your product, that’s not really an internship anymore. That’s just labour.

The post even said the quality of their AI models depends on the intern’s work. So clearly the role matters.

Feels like junior devs/data people are being asked for more and more every year:
degree, projects, certs, internships, GitHub, interview prep… and now apparently six months of unpaid skilled work too.

I get startups are tight on money, but asking MSc students to commit half a year unpaid doesn’t sit right with me at all.

I currently work as a team leader for a production team, at a manufacturing company where we build and supply electronic connectors, cable assemblies, to a range of different industries including medical, military, aviation.

It's a good steady busy job, but on an under average UK wage. I'm smart, driven, ambitious, hard working, eager to learn, and feel like I could be doing more, earning more.

I'm considering a few options, but data analysis and cloud engineering look like good paths for me. I'm great with computers, quick to learn and very technical (I also dabbled in software development in the past with JavaScript and quite enjoyed it).

I think the way to go is pay £31 a month for Coursera, and plough through relevant courses on that platform, and go from there, thoughts on that?

I've also tried some video editing, and freelance video editing seems quite exciting. No shortage of work there with growing social media content creation economy.

I'm also quite active and fit, I love the gym, am also considering getting qualified as a PT or Gym instructor, but again that's costly.

Appreciate any thoughts or help!

​Hi everyone, looking for some career perspective from the UK tech crowd. I have been working as a hybrid Project Manager and Software Engineer at a well-known, household-name UK food manufacturer since 2023. Before this, I was a Software Engineer at a major UK institution, but I was made redundant when they outsourced our department overseas.

​Last year, my life was turned upside down when my husband was made redundant from his long-term job. He found work three hours away, so we had to sell our house and relocate. My manager was understanding at the time and agreed to let me transition to working from home full-time so I could keep my job. I currently travel back down to the office one day a month, but I absolutely cannot do any more than that, as the train travel is a grueling three hours each way and incredibly expensive. It's also worth noting for team dynamics that I am the only female on the team.

​I’ve just received my year-end performance review, and while my official score is a solid, positive rating, reading between the lines of the feedback has left me feeling unsettled. To make matters worse, it is blindingly obvious that my boss wrote the raw feedback himself but then ran it through ChatGPT to rewrite it—the text is completely riddled with weird, AI-style bullet points and random floating dashes that he didn't even bother to clean up before submitting.

​Despite the lazy formatting, the underlying message is clear: on my technical and data-driven achievements, the review agrees my work is excellent. However, on tasks that involve general team support or hardware, he specifically points out my remote status. The AI-generated phrasing notes that while my output is fine, reaching the highest performance tiers would require me to be more "proactive," suggest improvements, and travel down more often to physically check on things.

​I’m feeling a bit stuck. I am delivering high-quality work, but it feels like my remote status—and perhaps the fact that I'm already a bit isolated as the only woman on the team—is putting a soft cap on my progression. It feels like I'm being quietly penalized for not being in the room by a manager who can't even be bothered to write his own review copy. Given the current UK job market, should I just keep my head down and accept that WFH might slow my career growth here, or is this a sign that my arrangement is causing friction and I should start looking for a truly remote-first company?

Hi, I’m a CS student in the UK, and most of the advice/content I see online about FAANG recruiting seems really US-focused, especially from people applying to internships/new grad roles.

I was just wondering:

• Is the hiring process for FAANG/big tech in the UK actually different compared to the US, or is the advice mostly the same?
• Do they care about different things on CVs compared to the US?
• Is LeetCode still the main thing to focus on for UK grad schemes/new grad roles? Or is it more system design focus/behavioural rounds?

Also, for anyone who got into FAANG / top tech companies in the UK:

• What made your CV stand out?
• What would you focus on if you were starting again? + Any mistakes you made during applications/interview prep?

For context, I’m mainly trying to optimise my CV and figure out the best prep strategy for UK grad schemes/new grad software engineering roles.

Would appreciate any advice from people who’ve been through the process recently, or any resources you could direct me towards!!

Hello, is it worth it to do a conversion to msc in computer science? I have a bsc in business management but i would like to get my foot in the tech industry…

I have had a call with a recruiter and he sent me a take home task for this London based startup. They expect me to put 14 hours of work for this. This sounds quite unreasonable to me. Is this the norm in today’s market?

Hi all!

I graduated in July 2025 in Software Engineering with a 2:1 in a non Russell group university in the UK. The job market has been tough as you’d expect!

I have been employed for few months now doing remote IT support which is absolutely better than nothing.

I have had a few interviews for SE based roles but nothing has come through there as of yet.

In terms of career progression in CS/SE, would you recommend pursuing a masters degree?

If so, would it be better to remain the in UK or travel abroad to study?

Thank you!

Got a verbal offer today for a SWE in London around an hour after the final interview.

During the initial recruiter screen I mentioned I was looking somewhere around £55k–70k depending on the overall role/package, and was told £55k was within budget.

Later on I got a call with the good news that they wanted to make an offer at £55k. During that same call, they also apologised because I had accidentally been sent another candidate’s offer email for the exact same role showing £60k before it was recalled and corrected.

I reacted positively on the phone because the offer came unexpectedly, but I haven’t formally accepted in writing yet.

Would it still be reasonable to negotiate closer to £60k? Or even slightly higher? How would you leverage this situation professionally without it coming across badly?

Throwaway for obvious reasons. Looking for advice and a bit of a sanity check.

I'm a software engineer with ~2 years of experience. I spent the last stretch on a software engineering graduate scheme at a large UK company, doing backend-focused work (Node.js, Python/Django, Java/Spring Boot, with some React on the frontend). My time there was mostly internal developer tooling and DevSecOps: I built a GitHub governance and audit platform used across the whole org, an org-wide code health dashboard surfacing security and code-quality data via AWS Athena, and migrated CI/CD pipelines off admin credentials onto least-privilege IAM roles.

I recently accepted an offer at a US company as a software engineer. It was a solid pay bump and I was genuinely excited. Then, the day before my start date, the offer was rescinded. No warning. So now I've left my previous role and I'm unemployed, looking for a junior/early-career software engineer position.

I'd really appreciate advice on:

• How do I frame the rescinded offer when recruiters ask why I'm currently out of work? I don't want it to look like a red flag on my end.
• Given my background is backend + DevSecOps tooling, should I be targeting general backend roles, platform/DevOps roles, or staying broad?
• Anything I should be doing differently with applications in the current London market?

I'm UK-based and open to anywhere in London. Happy to share more detail in comments. Thanks in advance.

I’m a final-year Computer Science student from West Yorkshire, and I’ve been applying to lots of graduate and entry-level tech jobs in Leeds and Manchester, but I haven’t had much success. A few went to assessment centres and then got rejected.

Now, I’ve got a bit further with a graduate tech role in financial services in London. My first Teams interview went really well, the recruitment process has been positive and they’ve invited me for an in-person interview with travel reimbursed.

The role is a two-year graduate programme, £40k–£45k, with five days in the office, starting around September. Apparently, there’s a good chance of staying on after the programme too, so it sounds like a good career move.
But London is stressing me out. I’ve never lived away from family and I’m not really keen on house sharing. The kind of studio or flat I’d feel comfortable in seems to be around £2k minimum within a reasonable commute, which makes the salary feel less exciting.

If this role was in Leeds or Manchester, I’d be thrilled. But because it’s London, I’m torn between taking the risk if I get an offer or just continuing to apply closer to home.
Is £40k–£45k enough in London if you don’t want to house share, or am I being a bit unrealistic?

I work as a swe (not QD not pnl related) in tier 2 HF. Before joining I checked glassdoor and levels.fyi to check what my TC can be, and I was happy with my TC.

But after seeing recent posts about people’s TCs and overheard that at the firm new grads get min 100k as base, I feel like my TC might be below average in this industry. Curious on how others think.

Base: 125k Bonus 40k
YoE 4yrs (2 in different industry, 2 in finance)

Hello everyone,

I’m trying to sanity-check salary expectations for a potential AI Engineer role at an early-stage healthtech startup based in Cambridge.

Context:

I have around 3–4 years of professional experience in deep learning / machine learning, mostly across applied AI, computer vision, biomedical or healthcare-related modelling, and more recently some GenAI / LLM-related work. I already worked in Cambridge in a health-related field, just after my Master's Degree.

The role would likely involve building predictive models in healthcare, working with patient-level data, risk modelling, and representation learning. It seems like a fairly core technical role rather than a generic ML support position.

The company is based in Cambridge, but I will remain based in Paris / France and travel to Cambridge roughly one week per month.

I’m trying to understand whether I should benchmark this against Cambridge salaries, London-adjacent AI salaries, or remote-from-Europe compensation.

A few questions:

1. What would be a reasonable base salary range for this kind of AI Engineer role?
2. For an early-stage startup, what kind of equity range would be reasonable for a non-founder but core AI engineer?
3. Should travel and accommodation for the Cambridge weeks normally be covered separately?
4. If I’m based in France, should I be thinking in terms of UK employment, EOR, or contractor setup?
5. Would £65k–70k base + equity + covered travel costs be reasonable, too low, or too high for this profile and setup?

My current thinking is that something around £65k–70k base, plus some equity and covered travel costs, sounds reasonable, but I’d like to know whether that’s aligned with the UK market or if I’m misjudging it.

Thanks.

I currently make about GBP 75K base in Edinburgh and am supporting a family of 2 (non-working spouse).

I work mostly with Python with skills in backend development, cloud, and applied AI engineering. How much is the income potential in the UK for similar roles? I do like my job and the pace of life here in the north of UK, but feel way underpaid when I speak to my friends in London or USA. So much so that I am losing motivation and interest in everything.

Is it possible to earn or save more if I relocated to around London? Is it really worth moving to London chasing higher salaries / savings? Or should I move to a different country and maybe try opportunities in Netherlands, Germany or Sweden.

Any inputs or advice would be highly appreciated.

I see them quite commonly in CVs a big keyword jumble of ‘skills’ usually programming languages, databases, frameworks etc etc.

I understand they make filler if you’re trying to increase CV length to a page but just curious what credence do other reviewers actually put on them.

(Personal view is the experience/projects trump it and I kinda disregard it because it’s hard to ascertain have you been doing it professionally for x years at a workplace, or was it a weekend tinker)

Hi,

About a month ago, I passed the loop for Google!

I graduated about 2 years ago and since then, I have been working at a good company in London as a SWE. My current TC here is probably slightly higher than Google, and on top of that, I am due to be promoted this summer, so I will be L4 with even higher TC...

While I enjoy my current job overall, but it is quite draining and a can get a bit toxic so I do want to join Google. However, I have a feeling that the Google offer will be L3. Not only will it be quite a significant pay cut (like 15-20% lower), I will also join as an L3 - not sure if this will stall my career growth.

While I am not too concerned about pay, I also don't want to feel as though I am taking a step backwards.

Hoping someone could chime in and give their two-cents on what they would do in this situation. I'm not sure whether or not my concerns are valid.

Accepted an offer for a cloud consultant role (entry level) and wanted to know if 30k offer (outside of London & fully remote) was fair and in the range for the average junior cloud role.
For context, I have no experience in cloud but have the right certifications in AZURE AND AWS. I have a degree but it’s a different field.
But I know I have the motivation, willingness to learn and know I will be able to do my job very well.
Do you think this is a fair offer? Or do you think i’m being over/underpaid???
Also, what should I expect future wise? When looking at salary progression. I’m new to this field so have no idea what the salaries are.

So for context I'm 25M and living in London (thankfully live at home).

I have a bachelor's in computer science from a pretty bad university but have a master's data science from a top 10 uni. In terms of my work experience I worked 2 years as a software engineer at a large engineering company working on the backend of their internal platform (predominantly Java and Spring Boot).

Around 8 months ago in September I got a job at a tech consultancy as a developer working for public sector clients whereby I've finished 2 projects already and have moved onto a 3rd project. For this role I mainly use a Scala and Play framework stack (mix of back end and front end).

So the thing I'm asking is am I being underpaid for the work I'm doing and my level of experience? In the engineering company I was getting paid 36k but a lot of it was spent commuting out of the city to the site. This current job is 40k however the commute is much better and I only have to be in around 2 times a week. Only downside is the salary review is in December so I'm gonna have to wait till the end of the year for any feasible pay rise.