Technical Director - Defence

About Faculty

Faculty transforms organisational performance through safe, impactful and human-led AI.

We are Europe’s leading applied AI company, and saw its potential a decade ago – long before the current hype cycle.

We founded in 2014 with our Fellowship programme, training academics to become commercial data scientists.

Today, we provide over 300 global customers with industry-leading software, and bespoke AI consultancy for retail, healthcare, energy, and governmental organisations, as well as our award winning Fellowship.

Our expertise and safety credentials are such that OpenAI asked us to be their first technical partner, helping customers deploy cutting-edge generative AI safely.

Our high-impact work has saved lives through forecasting NHS demand during covid, produced green energy by routing boats towards the wind, slashed marketing spend by predicting customer spending habits, and kept children safe online.

AI is an epoch-defining technology. We want people to join us who can help our customers reap its enormous benefits safely.

About the role

Our Technical Directors play a vital role in shaping the overall technical strategy for their business unit alongside assembling and managing the highly skilled team to deliver innovative solutions for our customers.
In this case, we are looking for someone to lead our Defence Business Unit.

Please note that due to the nature of our current project requirements, applicants must either hold or be eligible to hold valid a certain level of clearance, preferably Developed Vetting (DV). Faculty will cover in full any costs associated with this process.

What you’ll be doing

As part of your day-to-day job, you can expect your key responsibilities to include:

Technical Delivery

• Providing oversight of highly complex technical work, supporting and steering delivery teams when needed
• Identifying products, tools and processes to improve/enhance our ability to deliver quality
• Advising on matters of solution architecture, advanced modelling and engineering by bringing your own extensive technical background of developing both infrastructure and modelling software in resource-constrained settings

Leadership

• Building a team focused on best-in-class technical excellence and delivery by setting standards, defining ways of working and championing best practice
• Overseeing the professional development and learning for technologists in the team
• Co-owning the overall strategy for the Defence Unit incl. designing team structure, managing budgets, coordinating staffing and recruitment and managing performance

Business Development

• Identifying new technical markets to pursue/ technologies to build and equally, potential customer and partners opportunities within those markets
• Working with Business Directors, and the commercial team to land and expand market opportunities
• Delivering as the technical authority in meetings with senior client stakeholders

Who we’re looking for

To be successful in this role, you’ll have the unique ability to balance commercial, technical and strategic needs across multiple large-scale projects at a time, specifically in the Defence & National Security sectors. We’ll need someone who is highly motivated to work within Defence and has a passion for delivering solutions to some of the world’s most interesting problems through the delivery of safe, impactful and human-led AI.

In particular you’ll:

• Be an established technology leader with a track record of leading both the strategy and the delivery of projects in the AI / Machine Learning space
• Have the ability to communicate complex, technical information to internal and external stakeholders
• Ideally have experience in the Defence/National Security sector in particular within resource-constrained settings e.g. denied environments, edge and on-device
• Come from a hands-on background with real-world deployment experience of machine learning or AI applications in production and architecting hardware/software systems
• Show strong commercial aptitude, with the ability to maximise commercial, technical and strategic needs during end-to-end scoping of a project.
• Align with Faculty’s ethical approach to working in the Defence and National Security sector.

Beyond all of this, your attitude and behaviour are just as important as your skill and experience. We look for individuals who are empirical, support our values, foster our culture and want to deliver for our organisation.

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