AI Tech Lead Manager in London

Music is Universal

It’s the passionate and dedicated team at Universal Music who help make us the world’s leading music company. From A&R to finance, legal to digital, sales to marketing, Universal Music is the place to grow and develop your career within a truly commercial and innovative business that leads in everything it does.

Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles, and we are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, belief, age, marital status, background, pregnancy, or caring responsibilities. We also recognise the importance of diversity of thought within our teams and are fully committed to embracing the talents of people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other forms of neurocognitive variation.

We will always seek to make appropriate adjustments to recruitment, workplaces, and work processes to be fully inclusive to people with different needs and working styles. If you need us to make any reasonable adjustments for you from application onwards, including alternatives to the online form or to disclose a neurocognitive condition, please email UniversalMusicCareers@umusic.com.

Department

Part of the Global Technology organization, the Music and Advanced Machine Learning Lab (MAML)’s mission is to invent and build state of the art AI/ML tools to support and empower Artists, and industry professionals.

The MAML covers the full research & development lifecycle, from explorative research to prototypes to industrial scale products. It typically undertakes projects with applications such as, but not limited to, content understanding, content augmentation, creative tools, search, recommendation, etc.

We are curious, passionate and committed to push the envelope in AI for music. If you are excited at the idea of working on state-of-the-art AI at industry scale and make an impact, we want to hear from you!

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Tech Lead Manager to lead a team of engineers developing an intelligent video search platform that enables precise and flexible discovery across UMG’s extensive audiovisual catalogue. You will shape the technical vision, architecture, and execution for a platform that fuses media content processing, AI-driven search, metadata enrichment, to power discovery for our partners and internal creative teams.

Key Responsibilities:

Leadership and cross-functional collaboration

• Lead and mentor a team of backend, frontend, and AI engineers focused on video intelligence and retrieval systems.

• Foster a collaborative, inclusive culture of innovation, technical excellence, and rapid delivery.

• Partner with business stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical deliverables.

• Drive resource allocation, planning, and metrics-based delivery management.

Technical direction and delivery

• Own the design and evolution of an AI-driven video search and discovery platform.

• Oversee development of scalable ingestion, indexing, retrieval systems, and user-facing application (incl. backend and frontend/UI).

• Integrate multimodal AI models (video, audio, and text) to enable deep content understanding.

• Ensure system performance, availability, and security across cloud-based infrastructures.

• If and when required, make hands-on contributions to the technical development.

Skills and Experience Required:

Must have

• Strong background in Computer Science, Software Engineering, ML Ops, Artificial Intelligence or related technical field.

• 7+ years of software/ML engineering experience, including 2+ years in a technical lead role.

• Experience with people management.

• Proven ability to architect and ship complex systems.

• Deep understanding of content (video, audio) processing pipelines, metadata systems, and ML integration.

• Expertise in information retrieval methods and technology, (e.g. Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, vector databases).

• Experience with AI models across multiple modalities (video, audio, text).

• Proficiency in modern programming languages (Python, Java, or C++).

• Strong proficiency in Git, CI/CD workflows, and containerization (Docker/Kubernetes).

• Proficiency with Linux environments and cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud Platform).

• Champion software development best practices, code quality, documentation, observability.

• Excellent communication and leadership skills.

• Curious, self-motivated, and proactive.

Nice to have

• Experience with LLMs and associated tools (e.g. LangChain).

• Experience implementing high cybersecurity standards.

• Experience delivering full stack projects.

• Previous experience in the media, entertainment, or creative technology industries.

• Experience managing distributed teams.

• Passion for music and/or deep musical understanding.

Key Behaviours

• Visionary Technologist: You think beyond immediate problems — connecting data, AI, and creativity to imagine what’s next for video discovery.

• Empowering Leader: You bring out the best in your team by creating psychological safety, celebrating wins, and mentoring with empathy.

• Curious and Experimental: You’re energized by exploring new tools and ideas, running experiments, and learning fast from results.

• Outcome-Oriented: You’re driven by impact — building systems that deliver measurable creative and business value.

• Collaborative Partner: You thrive in cross-functional settings, bridging technical, business and creative disciplines seamlessly.

• Culturally Connected: You have a genuine interest in music and the role of technology in supporting culture.

Bonus Tracks: Your Benefits

• Group Personal Pension Scheme (between 3% and 9%)

• Private Medical Insurance

• 25 paid days of annual leave

• Interest Free Season Ticket Loan

• Holiday Purchase scheme

• Dental and Travel Insurance options

• Cycle to Work Scheme

• Salary Sacrifice Cars

• Subsidised Gym Membership

• Employee Discounts (Reward Gateway)

Just So You Know…

The company presents this job description as a guide to the major areas and duties for which the jobholder is accountable. However, the business operates in an environment that demands change and the jobholder’s specific responsibilities and activities will vary and develop. Therefore, the job description should be seen as indicative and not as a permanent, definitive, and exhaustive statement.

Job Category:

Universal Music Group