Head of AI

About the Role

We are partnering with an innovative company in the United Kingdom seeking a Head of AI to lead their ambitious engineering team that builds cutting-edge AI solutions addressing complex cybersecurity issues at scale. This position offers a unique blend of strategic leadership and hands-on technical involvement. As Head of AI, you will steer AI research direction, develop novel AI methods, and oversee production deployment of state-of-the-art autonomous agents and large language models (LLMs) in a fast-moving, remote-first environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Establish and lead the AI research strategy by identifying emerging technologies to build a practical and impactful product plan.
• Develop advanced evaluation systems to assess autonomous AI agents, tracking performance across complex workflows and improving model accuracy continuously.
• Prototype and implement innovative AI features rapidly, transitioning experimental concepts into production-quality solutions.
• Manage model fine-tuning processes, selection, routing strategies, context engineering, and inference performance optimization with real production data.
• Set technical priorities and evaluate new research and frameworks for business feasibility as leader of a high-impact AI engineering team.
• Participate actively in software development, architecture decisions, mentoring, code reviews, and collaborative problem-solving.
• Collaborate closely with engineering leadership, product managers, and clients to align AI capabilities with cybersecurity challenges and company needs.
• Continuously enhance AI systems' scalability, cost efficiency, reliability, and establish long-term technical standards.

Qualifications and Experience

• Proven leadership managing AI projects while remaining deeply engaged in coding and technical delivery.
• Successful track record designing and deploying production-grade LLM or agentic AI systems with real user impact.
• Strong expertise in transformer-based models, fine-tuning techniques including low-rank adaptation (LoRA), inference tuning, and generative AI methods.
• Experience constructing evaluation frameworks for non-deterministic AI systems including trajectory analysis, benchmarking, and systematic model assessment.
• Proficiency in programming and developing scalable machine learning systems for production environments.
• Experience working in dynamic startup settings driving projects from concept through deployment with autonomy.
• Exceptional leadership capabilities including mentoring engineers, defining engineering standards, and guiding cross-team technical decisions.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills with ability to balance innovation, performance, and operational costs pragmatically.
• Strong communication skills able to convey complex AI topics effectively to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Highly desirable: background in cybersecurity, vulnerability management, offensive security, or AI-driven security platforms.
• Additional advantage: experience optimizing model routing, inference cost reduction, reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), or AI evaluation pipelines and advanced machine learning research.

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive salary ranging from £180000 to £250000 annually.
• Equity share between 0.2% and 0.5%, presenting significant long-term ownership prospects.
• Fully remote working with flexibility across Europe for candidates based in the UK.
• Opportunity to shape AI strategy within a rapidly growing, venture-backed tech firm.
• Influence product direction as a member of the engineering leadership team.
• Work alongside seasoned engineering leaders from top-tier technology companies.
• Tackle highly advanced challenges in generative AI, autonomous agents, and cybersecurity domains.
• Strong career growth with a potential path toward executive AI leadership roles.

Additional Information

This role is managed through a partner company that handles applications and subsequent recruitment stages. The hiring process involves an AI-supported matching system to evaluate candidates objectively, but final hiring decisions involve human judgment. The company respects data privacy regulations including GDPR and uses AI tools only to assist and not replace human recruitment assessment.