Staff AI Engineer - Computer Vision & ML (London Area)

Staff Engineer – Computer Vision & ML

Hybrid (2+ days/week in London)

Permanent | up to £160k + equity

A well-funded startup is redefining how the world's top brands understand and act on real-world data. Their product uses state-of-the-art Visual AI to deliver insights in retail environments—at scale, in real time, and on edge devices.

As they continue to scale across Europe and the US, they are hiring a Staff Engineer to lead technical direction across their Machine Learning and Computer Vision teams. This is a hands-on leadership role suited to someone who thrives in applied AI environments and knows how to balance architectural vision with practical execution.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the technical direction for applied ML/CV efforts across edge and mobile platforms
• Architect and optimise scalable vision pipelines for real-world performance
• Act as a mentor and multiplier—raising the bar across a team of ML/CV engineers
• Stay close to code: from rapid prototyping to production-ready models
• Evaluate, test and deploy new techniques (e.g. synthetic data, efficient fine-tuning methods, robust inference strategies)
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, infra, and customer success teams

What We’re Looking For

• Proven track record delivering applied ML/CV solutions as an individual contributor
• Deep experience with detection/recognition models (e.g. YOLO, Mask R-CNN, custom pipelines)
• Practical understanding of edge deployment constraints (latency, performance, robustness)
• Strong Python skills and familiarity with libraries like PyTorch, OpenCV, and TensorRT
• Experience leading technical direction and mentoring other engineers
• Ability to own problems end-to-end, with minimal external support

Bonus Points For

• Experience with synthetic data generation and domain adaptation techniques
• Contributions to open-source ML/CV projects
• Experience working with mobile ML frameworks (e.g. Core ML, ONNX, TFLite)