Head of Machine Learning in London

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Salary: £97,500 per annum, plus company benefits.

Contract: Full time, permanent.

Shifts: 37.5 hours per week Mon‐Fri, 8:30am‐5pm with a 1‐hour unpaid break.

Work model: Fully remote.

Williams Lea seeks a Lead Machine Learning Engineer to join our team, building custom solutions for a global roster of clients across finance, legal, and professional services.

Purpose of the Role
This role is responsible for maintaining and expanding the enterprise data model, and for developing, publishing, and maintaining business‐critical reports for both internal and external stakeholders. You will collaborate closely with the Data & Analytics team, business stakeholders, and subject matter experts to solve organizational challenges through reporting, analysis, and data visualization.

Key Responsibilities

Provide enterprise‐wide expertise in data modelling, data quality management, report design, environment management, and automated data ingestion/refresh.

Act as a creative problem‐solver, contributing to the full product lifecycle and maintaining an organized, scalable reporting environment.

Produce reports that inform high‐level decision‐making and drive revenue growth.

Machine Learning Solution Development and MLOps

Machine Learning Solution Development: Design, develop and deploy ML models, algorithms and agentic AI systems to address complex business challenges across a range of sectors.

Cloud & MLOps Management: Lead the implementation of ML solutions on AWS cloud (with heavy use of Amazon SageMaker and related AWS services). Develop and maintain end‐to‐end CI/CD pipelines for ML projects, using infrastructure‐as‐code tools like AWS CloudFormation and Terraform to automate model deployment and system setup.

Project Leadership: Oversee the ML lifecycle from data preparation to model training, validation, and deployment. Make high‐level design decisions on model architecture and data pipelines. Mentor junior engineers and collaborate with data scientists, ML engineers and Software Engineering teams to ensure successful delivery of ML projects.

Client & Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate with project managers and stakeholders across a range of sectors to gather requirements and translate business needs into technical solutions. Present findings and ML model results to non‐technical audiences in a clear manner, and refine solutions based on their feedback.

Quality, Security & Compliance: Ensure ML solutions meet quality and performance standards. Implement monitoring and logging for models in production, and proactively improve model accuracy and efficiency. Enforce data security best practices and compliance with relevant regulations (e.g. data privacy and confidentiality) in all ML workflows.

About You
The ideal candidate is a self‐starter and individual contributor who thrives in a global, fast‐paced environment. You will be part of a team delivering market‐changing online services, contributing your technical expertise and strong work ethic.

Operate within an Agile/Scrum framework to meet the needs of a dynamic customer service and operations environment.

Be a hands‐on technologist, driving best practices and helping shape the strategic direction of the IT function.

Lead a small, distributed team of engineers across the US, UK, and India, ensuring alignment with business goals and service delivery expectations.

Manage cloud‐based platforms, leveraging tools like auto‐scaling, Infrastructure as Code, and continuous delivery methodologies to optimize performance and accelerate delivery.

Required Qualifications & Experience

Education: Bachelor\’s or Master\’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, or related field. Strong foundation in statistics and algorithms is expected.

Experience: 5+ years of hands‐on experience in machine learning or data science roles, with a track record of building and deploying ML models into production. Prior experience leading projects or teams is a plus for a lead role.

Programming & ML Skills: Advanced programming skills in Python (including libraries such as pandas, scikit‐learn, TensorFlow/PyTorch). Solid understanding of ML algorithms, model evaluation techniques, and optimisation. Experience with NLP techniques, generative AI or financial data modelling is advantageous.

Cloud & DevOps: Proven experience with AWS cloud services relevant to data science – particularly Amazon SageMaker for model development and deployment. Familiarity with data storage and processing on AWS (S3, AWS Lambda, Athena/Redshift, etc.) is expected. Strong knowledge of DevOps/MLOps practices – candidates should have built or worked with CI/CD pipelines for ML, using tools like Docker and Jenkins, and infrastructure‐as‐code tools like CloudFormation or Terraform to automate deployments.

Soft Skills: Excellent problem‐solving and analytical thinking. Strong communication skills to explain complex ML concepts to clients or management. Ability to work under tight deadlines and multitask across projects for different clients. A client‐focused mindset is essential, as the role involves understanding and addressing the needs of large clients who come to us because they trust us.

Preferred Experience

Domain Knowledge: Familiarity with use cases such as document classification, contract analytics, fraud/risk modelling, or NLP on legal texts will help the engineer design better domain‐tailored solutions.

Certifications: Relevant certifications such as AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty or AWS Solutions Architect, and any Machine Learning/Deep Learning specialisations, will be a plus (demonstrating validated expertise).

Tools & Frameworks: Experience with collaborative software development tools and practices (Git version control, code review), and with project management tools (JIRA or similar) in an agile environment. Familiarity with other MLOps tools (Kubeflow, MLflow, etc.) or big data processing frameworks (Spark) can be an added advantage.

Rewards and Benefits

25 days holiday, plus bank holidays (pro‐rata for part‐time roles)

Salary sacrifice schemes, retail vouchers – including our TechScheme which can be used on a range of gadgets such as smart TVs, laptops and computers or household appliances.

Life Assurance

Private Medical Insurance

Health Assessments

Discounted gym memberships

Referral Scheme

Equality and Diversity
The Company values the differences that a diverse workforce brings to the organisation and will not discriminate because of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race (which includes colour, nationality and ethnic or national origins), religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation (each of these being a \”protected characteristic\” in discrimination law). It will not discriminate because of any other irrelevant factor and will build a culture that values openness, fairness and transparency.

If you have a disability and would prefer to apply in a different format or would like to make a reasonable adjustment to enable you to make an interview please contact us at careersatWL@williamslea.com (we do not accept applications to this email address).

View our Privacy Notice https://www.williamslea.com/privacy-statement

Seniority level
Director

Employment type
Full‐time

Job function
Information Technology

Industries
Technology, Information and Media

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