Head of Machine Learning

Head of Machine Learning

Full-Time On-site
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Most ML products are wrappers. We're building the real thing, an agent that takes on genuine tasks for everyday users: running errands, managing workflows, holding context across long and complex conversations. Reliable by design, not by luck.

We're small, we move fast, and the ML layer is the product. We need someone to own it and lead the team.

The role

You'll bridge research and production, taking ideas and turning them into systems that run at scale, stay reliable, and get better over time. Full-stack ML ownership: from raw data to deployed model.

Day to day that looks like:

  • Managing end-to-end pipelines across data, training, evaluation, and inference
  • Adapting and fine-tuning models with modern techniques: LoRA, QLoRA, SFT, DPO, distillation
  • Architecting inference systems that hold up under real latency and cost constraints
  • Creating data pipelines that produce high-quality synthetic and real-world training data
  • Running evaluation that goes beyond benchmarks: robustness, safety, bias, production behaviour
  • Owning deployment: GPU optimisation, quantisation, memory efficiency, scaling
  • Working directly with application engineers so ML integrates cleanly into backend, mobile, and desktop

Your skills and experience

  • Previous team lead experience
  • Deep understanding of deep learning and transformer architectures
  • Proven experience training, fine-tuning, or shipping large-scale models in production
  • Strong with at least one major ML framework (PyTorch, JAX) and quick to pick up others
  • Familiar with distributed training and inference tooling: DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron, ZeRO, Ray
  • Engineering discipline: code that's readable, robust, and maintainable
  • Experience optimising for GPU constraints: quantisation, mixed precision, memory
  • Comfortable taking ownership of ambiguous problems from zero to one
  • Ships, iterates, learns from production

Nice to have

  • LLM inference frameworks: vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, FasterTransformer
  • RLHF: PPO, DPO, ORPO
  • Open-source contributions to ML or systems libraries
  • Scientific computing, compiler, or GPU kernel experience

At a big company, ML work gets absorbed into a machine. Here, your systems are the product. You'll work closely with research and engineering leadership, have real influence over how the architecture evolves, and see the direct impact of your work on users. If you want to build ML infrastructure that actually matters, this is it.

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Head of Machine Learning employer: Digital Waffle

As a leading ecommerce retailer, we pride ourselves on fostering a dynamic and inclusive work culture that empowers our employees to thrive. With a focus on professional development, we offer ample opportunities for growth and mentorship, particularly for those in project management roles. Located in Hereford, our hybrid working model allows for flexibility while ensuring collaboration with talented teams dedicated to delivering innovative technology solutions.

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Contact Details:

Digital Waffle Recruitment Team