Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Contract: Permanent

Location: Oxford, hybrid preferred, though we'd consider fully remote for the right person.

Reports to: Director of AI Delivery

Oxfida (formerly Aioi R&D Lab – Oxford) is an AI R&D company based in Oxford, on a mission to harness AI to understand, predict, and manage risk, helping build a safer, more resilient society.

We sit at the intersection of academia and industry, working with Oxford's professors and researchers alongside commercial partners, and combining that expertise with real-world risk data at global scale to turn frontier research into AI that actually ships rather than just gets published.

Our work spans AI for insurance underwriting and claims, AI risk governance, privacy-preserving technologies for agentic AI, and quantum optimisation, alongside partnership projects on nature and supply chains and the emerging challenges nobody's solved yet.

We build AI products and solutions for insurers, businesses, and public-sector organisations worldwide, and run innovative research projects that push these technologies further, helping people make better decisions in an uncertain world.

Trusted AI. Built in Oxford.

This is a genuine dual role: real line management and delivery leadership across Oxfida's ML engineering function, plus a meaningful hands-on contribution to technical delivery yourself. You'll manage a growing team of ML Engineers and Scientists, shape ML engineering practice across Oxfida, and stay close enough to the work to actually lead it technically, not just report on it.

Responsibilities

* Line-manage and develop ML engineers: coaching, mentoring, feedback, and input into hiring and onboarding.

* Stay hands-on with technical delivery on selected projects, alongside your leadership responsibilities across multiple engagements.

* Work with the Lead ML Scientist and Principal Engineer to build ML engineering best practice across Oxfida.

* Work closely with the Project and Account Management teams to design and scope ML solutions that drive value for our customers.

* Lead multidisciplinary teams of ML engineers, scientists, and software engineers, and support solution design so systems are robust and scalable.

* Provide oversight and quality assurance across concurrent projects, flagging technical and delivery risks early.

* Lead use case discovery and support pre-sales work alongside the commercial team.

* Drive reuse of shared frameworks and standards across projects, and communicate technical risk clearly to non-technical stakeholders.

Knowledge, Experience and Qualifications

* A STEM degree or equivalent practical experience, plus 7+ years in ML engineering, software engineering, or a related technical role, including experience leading technical work across teams.

* A strong software engineering background with real production-system delivery experience.

* Experience managing or leading ML engineers or technical contributors in a delivery-focused setting.

* Comfort supporting pre-sales or technical discovery work alongside commercial teams.

* The judgement to lead solution design and assure engineering quality without being the primary hands-on contributor on every project.

* Strong communication skills: you'll need to challenge stakeholder expectations sometimes, not just relay them.

Bonus points: experience establishing ML engineering/MLOps best practice from scratch, background in regulated or enterprise environments, or a track record of driving reuse through shared frameworks and tooling.

Why join us

* This is a genuine build-it role: shape how ML engineering is done as Oxfida scales up its delivery capability.

* Lead delivery across real products and live research, from fraud detection models already deployed in Japan and the UK to AI risk governance and quantum optimisation.

* You'll stay technical. This isn't a management role that pulls you away from the work, it's built to keep you in it.

* Direct line to the Director of AI Delivery and real input into use case shaping and pre-sales, not just delivery execution.

* Permanent role, real team, real influence over how Oxfida's engineering function grows from here