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.

• 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.