AI Data Lead

AI Data Lead

Location: Remote

Salary: £125,000 - £140,000

We're partnering with an innovative technology organisation that is investing heavily in AI-driven products and data infrastructure. As part of their continued growth, they are looking for an experienced AI Data Lead to take ownership of the data foundations that power modern AI applications.

This is an exciting opportunity for a hands-on technical leader who enjoys solving complex data challenges while mentoring and developing a growing team.

The Opportunity

As AI Data Lead, you'll be responsible for designing and delivering scalable data pipelines and retrieval infrastructure that support advanced AI solutions. You'll work across document processing, data ingestion, vector search, embeddings, and retrieval architectures to ensure high-quality data is available for AI-powered applications.

This role combines technical leadership with hands-on engineering, making it ideal for someone who enjoys both building solutions and guiding a team.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of data ingestion and processing pipelines for structured and unstructured content.
• Build and optimise retrieval systems, embeddings workflows, and vector search infrastructure.
• Develop robust parsing and extraction solutions for a variety of document formats.
• Establish data quality, governance, versioning, and monitoring standards.
• Design scalable data models and database architectures to support AI applications.
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to improve data accessibility and performance.
• Mentor and support a team of data-focused engineers, driving best practices and technical excellence.
• Contribute to architectural decisions and long-term platform strategy.

What We're Looking For

• Proven experience delivering production-grade data platforms and retrieval systems.
• Strong expertise with vector databases such as Qdrant, Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, or similar technologies.
• Experience designing embedding pipelines and retrieval-augmented architectures.
• Strong SQL and database design skills.
• Excellent Python development experience.
• Experience processing and extracting data from complex document formats.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP).
• Understanding of containerisation, CI/CD, and modern engineering practices.
• Previous experience leading, mentoring, or managing technical teams.
• A pragmatic, delivery-focused mindset with a passion for solving real-world problems.

Desirable Experience

• Full-text search technologies such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.
• NLP, information retrieval, or document intelligence solutions.
• Event-driven architectures and messaging platforms.
• Experience working within highly regulated or data-intensive environments.
• Contributions to open-source projects or technical communities.

What's on Offer

• Opportunity to shape the future direction of AI-enabled products.
• High level of autonomy and technical ownership.
• Collaborative and forward-thinking engineering culture.
• Flexible working arrangements.
• Competitive salary and benefits package.
• Clear progression opportunities within a growing organisation.

If you're passionate about building scalable AI data platforms and want to make a significant impact within a fast-moving technology environment, we'd love to hear from you.