AI Talent Lead - Nexus Black in London

Company Description

IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters–at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting-edge.

At IFS, we’re flexible, we’re innovative, and we’re focused not only on how we can engage with our customers but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society’s greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.

We celebrate diversity and understand our responsibility to reflect the diverse world we work in. We are committed to promoting an inclusive workforce that fully represents the many different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints of our customers, our partners, and our communities. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.

By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.

We’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs. With the power of our AI-driven solutions, we empower our team to change the status quo and make a real difference.

If you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.

About Nexus Black

IFS Nexus Black builds Industrial AI: AI that works at the point of work, on power lines, factory floors, aircraft hangars, and out in the field. Our products, Resolve (field service and predictive maintenance), Flow (production planning and scheduling), Comply (regulatory compliance intelligence) and Reason (an analytical reasoning engine), are used by technicians and engineers who cannot afford a tool that doesn't work first time. We pair 40 years of industrial experience from IFS with technical talent drawn from some of the best AI companies in the world. We measure ourselves in weeks, not months: our engineers spend time on customer sites, not just in front of a screen, and we expect the same grounded approach from every hire we make.

The Role

Nexus Black is scaling fast, and hiring is the constraint on almost everything else. We need someone who can build a talent function from the ground up: setting the strategy, doing the hands-on recruiting for our hardest technical and commercial roles, and building a small team to scale it. You will own hiring end to end, from AI Product, Engineering, Support, Adoption and Success through to the go-to-market talent who take our products to customers in vast array of industries we serve. You will work closely with Nexus Black's leadership, including our CEO, on the roles that matter most. This is a build role, not a maintenance one: there is no existing playbook to inherit, and you will be trusted to write it.

What You'll Do

• Own the hiring strategy across Nexus Black and adjusting it as headcount plans change.
• Recruit hands-on for our hardest and most senior roles, including AI Product/Engineering, forward-deployed engineers, as well as sales, customer success and industry-expert hires.
• Build and lead a small talent team as headcount grows, setting the standards, tools and processes they'll work to.
• Source where the talent actually is: build direct outreach channels for technical talent, most of whom are passive and rarely browsing job boards, rather than relying on inbound alone.
• Design the assessment bar alongside hiring leads, building interview processes and technical assessments that predict on-the-job performance, for both engineering and commercial roles.
• Bring market intelligence on compensation, levelling and hiring trends across AI/ML and industrial software talent, keeping offers competitive without overpaying.
• Build the employer brand for Nexus Black in a crowded AI hiring market: what we build, who we build it with, and why the work is different from a typical AI lab.
• Protect the candidate experience throughout, from first outreach to signed offer, in a market where the best candidates have several live offers at once.

Qualifications

What You'll Bring

• Experience recruiting technical AI/ML talent (research engineers, applied scientists or ML engineers), with enough technical fluency to hold a credible conversation about model architectures, evaluation and production ML.
• Experience hiring go-to-market talent (sales, customer success, solutions) at a scaling technology company.
• A track record of building or significantly scaling a recruiting or talent function, not just working within one someone else designed.
• Fluency in compensation benchmarking and levelling across technical and commercial roles, and the judgment to know when to move fast on comp.
• Confidence managing senior stakeholders, including founders and executives, and the ability to push back on a hiring manager's brief when it won't find the right candidate.
• A direct, evidence-based approach: you'd rather show a hiring manager three strong candidates and the data behind them than promise a large pipeline.
• Comfort with a fast-moving, resource-constrained environment where you're building the plane while flying it.

Nice to Have

• In-house recruiting experience at an AI lab, AI-native start-up, or high-growth industrial software company.
• Experience hiring for vertical or industrial AI, rather than purely consumer or enterprise SaaS.
• An existing network across the UK and European AI and industrial software talent markets.
• Experience setting up an applicant tracking system, sourcing tooling, or interview training from scratch.

Additional Information

Why Nexus Black

We're a small team building AI that has to work the first time, because the people using it are forty feet up a utility pole or standing next to a production line. We challenge everything, including our own assumptions, and we'd rather be questioned than agreed with. If you want to build a talent function with real ownership, in a company solving problems most AI companies never see, we'd like to talk to you.