AI Model Lead in Nottingham

Ideagen is building domain-specific AI models for environments where accuracy, traceability, and accountability matter. As AI Models Lead, you will take technical ownership of how language models are adapted, evaluated, and promoted into production across EHS, Quality, and GRC workflows. This is a senior, hands-on engineering leadership role with responsibility for setting the technical standard for fine-tuning at scale, from data and evaluation design through to production-ready adapter libraries.

Location: Ruddington, Nottinghamshire. Working pattern: Remote unless based locally.

Responsibilities:

• Leading and developing the AI Models Team, setting engineering standards, mentoring engineers, and establishing a strong technical culture.
• Designing and owning the end-to-end fine-tuning methodology, including training configuration, evaluation gates, reproducibility standards, and promotion criteria.
• Making base model selection decisions across foundation model families, balancing capability, cost, and inference constraints for different domain tasks.
• Owning LoRA and QLoRA adaptation strategy, including configuration choices, training compute decisions, and compatibility with the inference layer.
• Applying supervised fine-tuning and preference optimisation techniques to domain-specific classification and compliance problems.
• Building robust evaluation frameworks with domain experts to assess whether models are performing correctly in real EHS, Quality, and GRC use cases.
• Leading dataset design and construction, defining labelling standards and ensuring training data is versioned, auditable, and reproducible.
• Owning production training and adapter lifecycle management, from large-scale training jobs through to registry promotion and release readiness.

Qualifications and Skills:

• You have a proven track record of fine-tuning language models that serve real production traffic, with a strong understanding of operational failure modes.
• Deep practical experience with LoRA and QLoRA, and clear intuition for the trade-offs between quality, compute cost, and inference performance.
• Hands-on experience applying alignment techniques such as supervised fine-tuning and preference optimisation to real-world problems.
• Strong tooling fluency with modern ML frameworks and experimentation platforms, including debugging and scaling training pipelines.
• High-quality Python engineering skills, with emphasis on readable, testable, and maintainable training and evaluation code.
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers in a technical ML environment, with a people-first approach to leadership.
• Comfortable working with subject-matter experts to define “what good looks like” when evaluation requires real domain judgment.
• Background or interest in regulated domains such as EHS, quality management, healthcare, or financial services is advantageous.

Benefits: At Ideagen

About Ideagen: Ideagen is the invisible force behind many things we rely on every day. We have offices worldwide and are building a future-ready AI-enabled team.

What is next: If your application meets the requirements for this role, our Talent Acquisition team will be in touch to guide you through the next steps. To request reasonable adjustments during the application process, please contact recruitment@ideagen.com. All matters will be treated with strict confidence. We value work-life balance and welcome candidates seeking flexible arrangements during the application process.