Head of AI

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Head of AI based in the United Kingdom.

Join an ambitious engineering organization building next-generation AI systems that solve complex real-world cybersecurity challenges at scale. This is a rare opportunity for a hands on technical leader to define AI strategy while remaining deeply involved in research, experimentation, and production development. You'll work alongside experienced engineering leaders to advance cutting edge LLMs, autonomous agents, and evaluation frameworks that directly influence the company's competitive advantage. The role combines technical innovation, strategic decision making, and product ownership in a fast paced, remote first environment where rapid iteration and measurable impact are valued. If you're passionate about agentic AI, production grade machine learning, and solving problems that few organizations have tackled successfully, this position offers exceptional ownership and influence.

Accountabilities

• Define and drive the company's AI research strategy, identifying emerging technologies and translating them into a practical product roadmap.
• Lead the development of advanced evaluation frameworks for autonomous AI agents, measuring performance across complex, non deterministic workflows and continuously improving model quality.
• Design, prototype, and deploy innovative AI capabilities, moving rapidly from experimentation to production ready solutions.
• Own fine tuning pipelines, model selection, routing strategies, context engineering, and inference optimization using production data.
• Guide technical priorities across a high performing AI engineering team, evaluating new research, frameworks, and methodologies based on business value and technical feasibility.
• Lead by example through active software development, architecture decisions, technical mentoring, code reviews, and collaborative problem solving.
• Partner closely with engineering leadership, product teams, and customers to align AI capabilities with business needs and real world security challenges.
• Continuously improve AI performance, scalability, cost efficiency, and production reliability while establishing long term technical standards.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading AI initiatives while remaining deeply involved in hands on software development and technical execution.
• Demonstrated success designing, deploying, and maintaining production grade LLM or agentic AI systems used by real customers.
• Deep understanding of transformer architectures, fine tuning techniques (including approaches such as LoRA), inference optimization, and modern generative AI methodologies.
• Strong experience building evaluation frameworks for autonomous or non deterministic AI systems, including trajectory analysis, benchmarking, and model assessment.
• Excellent programming skills with experience developing scalable machine learning systems in production environments.
• Experience working within fast paced startup environments, driving projects from concept to deployment with minimal oversight.
• Strong technical leadership skills, including mentoring engineers, establishing engineering standards, and influencing cross functional technical decisions.
• Outstanding analytical thinking, problem solving abilities, and the capacity to make pragmatic decisions balancing innovation, performance, and operational cost.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex AI concepts to both technical and non technical stakeholders.
• Experience in cybersecurity, vulnerability management, offensive security, or AI powered security platforms is highly desirable.
• Experience optimizing model routing, inference costs, RLHF, or AI evaluation pipelines, along with advanced academic research in machine learning, is considered a strong advantage.

Benefits

• Competitive annual salary ranging from £180,000 to £250,000.
• Equity package ranging from 0.2% to 0.5%, offering significant long term ownership potential.
• Fully remote role with flexibility to work across Europe while based in the United Kingdom.
• Opportunity to shape the AI strategy of a rapidly growing, venture backed technology company.
• Direct influence on product direction as part of the engineering leadership team.
• Work alongside experienced engineering leaders with backgrounds in globally recognized technology companies.
• Opportunity to tackle some of the most advanced challenges in generative AI, autonomous agents, and cybersecurity.
• Strong career growth potential with a pathway toward executive AI leadership as the organization expands.