AI Team Lead

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United Kingdom.

📋 Description

• Lead a team of AI Engineers, ensuring alignment on objectives, quality, and delivery schedules.

• Mentor and coach team members to foster their technical and professional development.

• Promote engineering excellence by advocating best practices in coding (PEP-8, Clean Code), Test-Driven Development, code review, CI/CD, and responsible AI development.

• Plan and oversee team capacity, sprints, and milestones to guarantee predictable delivery.

• Take ownership of the design, evolution, and operation of our RAG and agentic AI services — retrieval, embedding, indexing, orchestration, evaluation, and LLM Ops.

• Establish and uphold standards for prompt engineering, evaluation harnesses, guardrails, hallucination mitigation, and content safety.

• Collaborate with the Data team to make curated Druid datasets accessible via natural-language interfaces (text-to-SQL / semantic search), ensuring quality and consistency throughout.

• Work alongside Product, UX, and Architecture teams to convert customer and internal use cases into well-defined AI capabilities with clear acceptance criteria.

• Advocate for responsible AI practices — promoting bias awareness, transparency, privacy, data minimization, evaluation, monitoring, and clear communication of model limitations within products.

• Partner with other Team Leaders, Development Managers, Architects, and Product Owners to align engineering execution with business goals.

• Contribute to the advancement of development processes, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices.

• Cultivate a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, and knowledge sharing — adopting a research-informed approach in a rapidly evolving field.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 7 years of experience in commercial software development.

• At least 2 years of experience leading an engineering team, with a solid understanding of Agile methodologies (Scrum / Kanban).

• Proficient in Python and SQL; comfortable working with Git and Docker.

• Strong foundation in engineering principles — Clean Code, PEP-8, Test-Driven Development, CI/CD, and code review.

• Proven experience in delivering production Generative-AI features — Retrieval-Augmented Generation (chunking, embedding, hybrid retrieval, reranking), LLM Ops (prompt management, evaluation harnesses, observability, versioning), and vector databases (e.g. pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, Chroma).

• Firm commitment to responsible AI development — focusing on guardrails, hallucination mitigation, evaluation against ground truth, content safety, data privacy, and clear communication of model limitations within products.

• Experience in data analytics and visualization, with the ability to collaborate effectively with a data/BI team on shared datasets.

• Outstanding communication, teamwork, attention to detail, organizational, and leadership abilities.

• Capacity to inspire, mentor, and lead by example.

• Inquisitive, analytical, collaborative, and resilient, with adaptability to change in a fast-paced environment.

• *Nice to have*

• Exposure to DevOps practices — Kubernetes and Terraform.

• Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) — experience in building or utilizing MCP servers/tools.

• Experience integrating LLMs with OLAP/SQL serving layers (Apache Druid, Apache Superset) — text-to-SQL, semantic layers, and governed natural-language access.

• Knowledge of agent frameworks and orchestration (e.g. LangChain, LlamaIndex, DSPy, custom orchestrators) and relevant tool-use patterns.

• Research-driven mindset — keeps up with the latest literature and is comfortable evaluating new techniques on real workloads.

• Experience in the maritime domain (regulations, training, crew operations) or other regulated industries.

🏝️ Benefits

• Private medical insurance

• Matching pension contribution up to 5%

• BUPA cash plan (to cover out-of-pocket medical expenses) and Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)

• Life assurance

• Additional Benefits:

• We support a remote working environment

• Facilitate internal mobility by posting all vacancies on our internal job board

• Offer a referral fee

• Foster a culture of continuous development and growth