Associate Director

🚀 Senior AI Delivery Lead | Associate Director | Security & Justice

📍 United Kingdom | Permanent | Leading Consultancy

Are you an AI engineer who's tired of being the person who "advises" on AI — and actually wants to build it?

We're hiring a Senior AI Delivery Lead at Associate Director level for a high-impact practice working across some of the UK's most complex public sector programmes. Think policing, defence, justice, and national security — environments where the bar for reliability, security, and responsible AI is about as high as it gets.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You'll be architecting and shipping production-grade AI systems, not producing slide decks about them.

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WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

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🔧 Technical Architecture

• Designing end-to-end LLM and RAG systems integrated into complex enterprise workflows

• Deploying and optimising models on AWS Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry, and self-hosted GPU infrastructure (vLLM, SGLang, Ollama)

• Building robust MLOps/LLMOps pipelines — CI/CD, model monitoring, evaluation frameworks, observability

• Making the call on when AI is the right answer — and when a simpler solution is better

📦 Delivery

• Translating client requirements into technical roadmaps and shipping production-ready systems

• Moving AI from prototype to hardened, live service in high-security environments

• Proactively managing technical risk — security vulnerabilities, deployment bottlenecks, delivery timelines

👥 Leadership

• Leading cross-functional teams of data scientists and engineers

• Communicating complex AI concepts to senior non-technical stakeholders

• Mentoring and upskilling engineers, building a culture of engineering excellence

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WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

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✅ Expert Python — plus hands-on experience with LangChain, LangGraph, PyTorch, TensorFlow or equivalent

✅ Deep knowledge of LLMs, RAG, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, vector databases, and generative architectures

✅ Production AI/ML delivery experience — real-world impact matters more than credentials

✅ Cloud-agnostic experience across AWS, Azure, and GCP

✅ Strong MLOps/LLMOps background — CI/CD for ML, governance, model monitoring

✅ Experience leading technical teams and managing senior stakeholder relationships

✅ Track record in a complex, regulated industry — healthcare, government, finance, defence, or similar

No minimum education requirement. A PhD, strong industry experience, or impressive open source contributions all count equally. What matters is shipped, production-grade AI.

Domain experience in Security & Justice is a bonus — not a prerequisite. A willingness to upskill in the sector is what counts.

Security Clearance may be required.

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WHY THIS ROLE?

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💡 Real ownership — architect and deliver, not just advise

🏛️ High-stakes, meaningful work — the kind where your systems actually matter

📈 Career trajectory — joining at a moment of significant AI scale-up

🤝 Senior exposure — direct engagement with client leadership from day one

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Interested or know someone who might be? Drop me a message or apply directly — all conversations are confidential.

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