Lead Machine Learning Engineer
💸 £120,000–£130,000
🌍 One day a week in London (exceptional circumstances could allow one day a month)
📈 Equity Options
🏖️ 25 Days Holiday + Bank Holidays
💰 Pension matched up to 7%
✈️ Work abroad for up to 3 months
Drive Innovation. Lead the Future of Machine Learning/AI Engineer
Are you ready to lead a world-class Machine Learning team delivering cutting-edge, production-grade systems?
We're looking for aLead Machine Learning Engineer — a "plug-and-play" leader with proven experience in people management and deep technical expertise — to shape the direction of our GenAI and retrieval-focused streams.
This is a leadership role where you’ll not only design and build advanced machine learning solutions but also line-manage engineers, coordinate delivery across high-impact ML projects, and define the technical bar across the team. Your compensation reflects both the strategic leadership scope and technical excellence expected in this role.
What you'll be doing:
- Lead and manage a team of machine learning engineers — providing mentorship, setting performance standards, and guiding career development.
- Set the technical direction for GenAI and retrieval-based systems, ensuring consistent architecture, tooling, and research-to-production workflows.
- Act as delivery owner across multiple ML streams, coordinating timelines, resources, and cross-functional collaboration.
- Drive best practices for scalable, reproducible, and robust ML system development.
- Be hands-on when needed, contributing to model development and high-impact technical decisions.
- Stay on top of research and emerging trends, bringing innovative approaches to real-world problems.
- Promote a culture of experimentation, open communication, and continuous learning across the team.
What you'll bring:
- Experience line-managing ML engineers and leading delivery across multiple, concurrent ML workstreams.
- Strong technical background in machine learning engineering — with production-level experience in Python, SQL, and frameworks like PyTorch or scikit-learn.
- Deep expertise in GenAI, LLMs, RAG systems, NLP, recommendation engines, or information retrieval stacks.
- Strong understanding of the full model lifecycle — from research and experimentation to deployment and monitoring.
- Familiarity with cloud-based ML infrastructure — especially AWS.
- Clear communication skills, strategic mindset, and the ability to make trade-offs in a fast-moving, startup-style environment.
This is more than just a leadership role — it’s a chance to help shape one of the most advanced Machine Learning teams in the UK. If you're looking to step into a role with real ownership, high impact, and the opportunity to define what great ML engineering looks like, we want to hear from you.
