VP / Head of Engineering

The Company

Our client is a London-based technology company that’s in high growth mode. They have developed the independent pure play AI testing and monitoring platform that solves one of the most urgent and commercially valuable problems – helping organisations actually deploy AI that works, safely and compliantly.

The Role

The company is seeking a VP / Head of Engineering to lead and scale their engineering organisation across platform development, machine learning systems and research enablement.

The role is responsible for ensuring that the technology operates as a cohesive system enabling research innovation to translate into production-ready capabilities and ensuring customer deployments continuously inform platform evolution.

You will lead a multidisciplinary team spanning software engineers, ML engineers and research-supporting engineers, balancing long term platform development with the practical demands of deploying and supporting systems in complex environments. This is a hands-on leadership role, requiring close involvement in architecture and technical decision-making while scaling teams, systems and delivery.

Responsibilities

Lead and scale engineering

• Build and grow a multidisciplinary team across platform, ML, and research support
• Define team structures, ownership and ways of working
• Foster a culture of accountability, quality, and continuous improvement

Own technical direction

• Define and evolve platform architecture for scalability, reliability and flexibility
• Guide critical technical decisions and maintain system coherence
• Ensure consistency across APIs, data models, and services

Enable ML and research in production

• Establish effective pathways from research to production systems
• Ensure ML systems are reliable, observable, and maintainable
• Align research, ML, and platform into a unified engineering approach

Drive effective delivery

• Evolve delivery practices across platform and customer-driven work
• Ensure consistent execution, clear priorities, and realistic planning
• Identify and resolve systemic bottlenecks

Connect platform and real-world use

• Align platform development with customer deployments
• Establish feedback loops from usage into product evolution
• Balance reusable product capabilities with flexibility for complex environments

Scale engineering systems

• Improve standards across CI/CD, testing, observability, and security
• Ensure systems meet requirements for regulated environments
• Prepare tooling, workflows, and processes for team and platform growth

Collaborate across the business

• Partner with Product to align engineering with roadmap and priorities
• Work with research leadership to align innovation with platform capabilities
• Engage stakeholders to ensure technical direction supports customer needs

Requirements

• Proven experience leading engineering teams delivering complex software systems
• Strong background in software engineering, system architecture and scalable platforms
• Experience working with data-intensive or ML-enabled systems
• Ability to coordinate multiple technical disciplines (e.g. software, ML, research workflows)
• Experience delivering systems into customer or operational environments
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, APIs, and distributed systems (AWS or equivalent)
• Experience establishing engineering processes and best practices
• Excellent leadership, communication and stakeholder management skills

Because our client works with regulated and government customers in the UK, UK nationality is required for this role. Please only apply if you are a UK national.