Director of AI Systems & Foundation Models

This role is designed for a senior AI leader who operates at the frontier of machine learning and real-world impact. The focus is on building and scaling advanced AI systems that learn from complex, messy, multi-modal data and turn that learning into reusable capabilities that materially improve decision-making and outcomes.

What this person actually does

• Leads a high-calibre team of AI scientists and ML engineers building large-scale, production-ready AI systems
• Designs and delivers foundation models using self-supervised and representation learning techniques
• Builds models that learn across multiple data modalities and scales, from granular signals through to population-level insights
• Embeds explainability, uncertainty and causal reasoning into model design, not as an afterthought
• Partners closely with downstream teams to ensure models can be fine-tuned, deployed and deliver real-world impact
• Makes clear, defensible build vs adapt vs buy decisions across models, tooling and external partnerships
• Sets standards for model evaluation, benchmarking, validation and data quality
• Represents the organisation externally through publications, open-source contribution or recognised thought leadership

What success looks like

• Reusable AI systems that are actively leveraged across multiple high-value applications
• Models that improve as new data modalities are introduced
• Clear translation from research into deployed capability
• Strong internal confidence in model outputs due to explainability and uncertainty awareness
• A motivated, high-performing team with strong retention and progression

The kind of background that fits

• Deep expertise in modern machine learning, especially foundation models, self-supervised learning or representation learning
• Strong understanding of neural network architectures, multi-modal learning and transfer learning
• Experience with distributed training, large-scale model optimisation and efficient fine-tuning
• Proven track record of research impact (top-tier publications, widely adopted systems or equivalent)
• Comfortable working with imperfect, real-world data rather than curated academic data sets
• Experience translating advanced research into production-grade systems
• Senior leadership experience, including leading leaders, hiring at scale and owning capability road maps
• Confident communicator who can bridge technical depth and strategic clarity with senior stakeholders

Mindset and style

• Comfortable with ambiguity and research uncertainty
• Commercially and impact-oriented, not research-for-research’s-sake
• Curious, rigorous and opinionated, but open to challenge
• Sets a high bar for quality, documentation and reproducibility
• Motivated by building things that matter, not just publishing them

Why this role is compelling

This is a rare opportunity to operate at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and meaningful real-world application, with the scope to define how advanced machine learning systems are designed, evaluated and used at scale.