AI Team Lead

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

📋 Description

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

• Guide and mentor team members to facilitate their technical and professional development.

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

• Organize and manage team capacity, sprints, and milestones to guarantee predictable delivery.

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

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

• Collaborate with the Data team to provide curated Druid datasets through natural-language interfaces (text-to-SQL / semantic search) while ensuring end-to-end quality and consistency.

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

• Advocate for responsible AI practices, including bias awareness, transparency, privacy, data minimization, evaluation, monitoring, and clear communication of model limitations within the product.

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

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

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

⛳️ Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in commercial software development.

• 2+ years of experience leading an engineering team with a strong understanding of Agile methodologies (Scrum / Kanban).

• Proficient in Python and SQL; familiar with Git and Docker.

• Solid understanding of engineering principles, including Clean Code, PEP-8, Test-Driven Development, CI/CD, and code reviews.

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

• Strong dedication to responsible AI development, emphasizing 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 a comfort level in collaborating with data / BI teams on shared datasets.

• Excellent communication, teamwork, attention to detail, organizational, and leadership capabilities.

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

• Inquisitive, analytical, collaborative, and resilient, able to adapt to changes in a fast-paced environment.

• *Nice to have*

• Exposure to DevOps practices, including Kubernetes and Terraform.

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

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

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

• A research-driven mindset that keeps abreast of the latest literature and is comfortable evaluating new techniques against real workloads.

• Background in the maritime domain (regulations, training, crew operations) or experience in 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

• Further Benefits:

• We operate in a remote working environment

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

• Offer a referral fee

• Foster a culture of continuous development and growth