AI Team Lead

Role Overview

• Lead a team of AI Engineers, ensuring alignment on goals, quality and delivery timelines.
• Mentor and coach team members to support their technical and professional growth.
• Drive engineering excellence by promoting best practices in coding (PEP-8, Clean Code), Test-Driven Development, code review, CI/CD and responsible AI development.
• Plan and manage team capacity, sprints and milestones to ensure predictable delivery.
• Own the design, evolution and operation of our RAG and agentic AI services — retrieval, embedding, indexing, orchestration, evaluation and LLM Ops.
• Set and maintain standards for prompt engineering, evaluation harnesses, guardrails, hallucination mitigation and content safety.
• Partner with the Data team to expose curated Druid datasets through natural-language interfaces (text-to-SQL / semantic search) and ensure quality and consistency end-to-end.
• Collaborate with Product, UX and Architecture to translate customer and internal use cases into well-defined AI capabilities with clear acceptance criteria.
• Champion responsible AI — bias awareness, transparency, privacy, data minimisation, evaluation, monitoring, and clear in-product communication of model limitations.
• Collaborate with other Team Leaders, Development Managers, Architects and Product Owners to align engineering execution with business objectives.
• Contribute to the evolution of development processes, CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement, innovation and knowledge sharing — including a research-aware approach to a fast-moving field.

Requirements

• 7+ years of commercial software development experience.
• 2+ years leading an engineering team with a solid grasp of Agile methodologies (Scrum / Kanban).
• Strong hands-on Python and SQL; comfortable in Git and Docker.
• Deep grounding in engineering principles — Clean Code, PEP-8, Test-Driven Development, CI/CD, code review.
• Demonstrable experience shipping 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).
• Strong commitment to responsible AI development — guardrails, hallucination mitigation, evaluation against ground truth, content safety, data privacy and clear in-product communication of model limitations.
• Experience with data analytics and visualisation, and comfort partnering with a data / BI team on shared datasets.
• Exceptional communication, teamwork, attention to detail, organisational and leadership skills.
• Ability to inspire, mentor and lead by example.
• Inquisitive, analytical, collaborative, and resilient and adaptive to change in a fast-moving field.

Nice to have

• DevOps exposure — Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) — exposure to building or consuming MCP servers / tools.
• Experience integrating LLMs with OLAP / SQL serving layers (Apache Druid, Apache Superset) — text-to-SQL, semantic layers, governed natural-language access.
• Familiarity with agent frameworks and orchestration (e.g. LangChain, LlamaIndex, DSPy, custom orchestrators) and tool-use patterns.
• Research-driven mindset — keeps up with the literature and is comfortable assessing new techniques on real workloads.
• Maritime domain (regulations, training, crew operations) or other regulated-industry experience.

Tech Stack

• Apache
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Python
• SQL
• Terraform

Benefits

• Private medical insurance
• Matching pension contribution up to 5%
• BUPA cash plan (to fund out of pocket medical costs) and Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
• Life assurance

Further Benefits:

• We operate a remote working environment
• Enable internal mobility by posting all vacancies on our internal job board
• We offer a referral fee
• Provide a culture of continuous development and growth