Head of AI

A growing technology‑led business is looking to appoint a Head of AI to lead the development, implementation, and long‑term adoption of AI capabilities across the organisation. This is a strategic and hands‑on leadership role focused on shaping the company’s AI direction while overseeing the successful delivery of AI solutions from concept through to live deployment and business adoption.

Working closely with IT, operational, commercial, and leadership teams, you will drive practical AI initiatives using Azure, LLMs, machine learning, and AI agents – ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, integrated, and delivering measurable business impact. The organisation is already investing heavily in AI and exploring a broad range of initiatives. They are now looking for an experienced AI leader who can combine technical expertise with strategic thinking, helping define the AI roadmap while building internal capability and leading implementation across the business.

This role would suit someone who enjoys building and scaling AI functions, leading innovation, solving operational challenges, and delivering transformational business outcomes in a fast‑moving environment.

Role Purpose

• Lead the organisation’s AI capability, strategy, and implementation roadmap.
• Responsible for identifying, prioritising, and delivering AI solutions that create measurable operational and commercial value.
• Working across the business, you will oversee the design, deployment, governance, and adoption of AI technologies while helping shape the future AI direction of the organisation.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and lead the organisation’s AI strategy, roadmap, and long‑term capability development.
• Identify and prioritise AI opportunities across operational, commercial, and customer‑facing areas of the business.
• Design and oversee the development of high‑performing AI models tailored to business needs.
• Lead AI initiatives from proof of concept and rapid prototyping through to enterprise‑scale production deployment.
• Work closely with IT Infrastructure and Development teams to deploy secure, scalable AI solutions into production environments.
• Ensure AI solutions meet enterprise‑grade security, governance, and compliance standards including Private Endpoints and secure integrations.
• Drive adoption of AI technologies across the organisation and ensure solutions become embedded within day‑to‑day workflows.
• Establish AI governance, operational standards, and best practices for deployment, monitoring, scalability, and risk management.
• Implement monitoring and evaluation frameworks for production AI environments, including hallucination detection, drift monitoring, performance optimisation, and GenAIOps processes.
• Ensure AI solutions integrate effectively with existing systems, APIs, and data platforms.
• Collaborate with senior stakeholders to evaluate business value, project feasibility, and ROI before implementation.
• Measure and report on AI project outcomes including efficiency gains, automation improvements, productivity, and customer impact.
• Provide leadership, mentorship, and technical direction to internal teams and future AI hires.
• Stay informed on emerging AI technologies, trends, and opportunities to maintain competitive advantage.

Required Experience

• Proven experience leading AI strategy, implementation, or AI transformation initiatives within a business environment.
• Deep expertise in Python and modern AI/ML frameworks and SDKs.
• Strong experience building and deploying production‑grade AI solutions, including RAG pipelines and LLM‑based applications.
• Hands‑on experience with AI deployment, operationalisation, monitoring, and scaling.
• Strong understanding of enterprise infrastructure concepts including VNets, Entra ID, API Gateways, Private Endpoints, and secure integrations.
• Experience working with at least one major enterprise AI cloud platform (Azure preferred).
• Strong SQL skills and experience working with both structured and unstructured data.
• Experience building AI agents, workflow automation, and tool/API integrations.
• Strong commercial awareness with the ability to assess business value and prioritise AI initiatives effectively.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to engage both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Strong leadership, problem‑solving, and strategic thinking capabilities.

Desirable Experience

• Experience leading or building internal AI functions or teams.
• Experience with LLMOps / GenAIOps tooling and monitoring frameworks.
• Exposure to OCR, computer vision, voice AI, or conversational AI solutions.
• Experience working within operational, retail, automotive, or customer‑focused businesses.
• Familiarity with AI governance, security, and scalability best practices.
• Experience driving organisation‑wide AI adoption and change management initiatives.