Sovereign Battlefield AI Model Lead

NestAI; Jyväskylä; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Occupational healthcare (Mehiläinen)

Epassi Flex benefit

Lunch benefit

Regular team lunches

Mac or PC choice

Holiday allowance

Phone benefit

Job summary

NestAI is seeking a Model Development Lead in Europe, with a focus on battlefield-autonomy related AI, to set technical direction for an existing team and grow the group. You will own architecture, roadmap, and product-aligned decisions, while shaping the foundation model’s capabilities and deployment strategy for sovereign European control.

The role requires deep expertise in pre-training, fine-tuning, multimodal learning, and deployment trade-offs, plus the ability to collaborate with external

Qualifications

• Senior experience in training and leading the training of large-scale, multimodal AI models.
• Deep technical competence in model development, including pre-training, fine-tuning, evaluation, multimodal learning, long-context reasoning, model compression, and deployment trade-offs.
• Experience building or adapting models for constrained deployment environments, including quantisation, distillation, pruning, or other compression techniques for edge, embedded, or air-gapped systems.
• Strong evaluation discipline: ability to define domain-specific benchmarks, failure modes, acceptance criteria, and feedback loops for models where standard academic benchmarks are not enough.
• Experience working across model architecture, data strategy, training infrastructure, inference deployment, and product integration.
• Experience collaborating with external research partners while maintaining internal technical ownership and architectural control.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical architecture and roadmap, translating an ambitious vision into a sequenced plan that can be executed and that creates verifiable milestones.
• Build an understanding of NestAI strategy of battlefield autonomy and orchestration and map how the model development acts as a layer that elevates the overall company roadmap through the foundation model.
• Operate with real decision authority to make sure that we iterate quickly and fail fast. You’re not just an advisory voice but charted with making ambiguity reality.
• Represent the project's technical thinking to help attract the caliber of talent this kind of work requires.
• Report progress in a form leadership can act on: an agreed scoping, a phased plan with clear decision gates, and an honest account of risks and opportunities.
• Grow and staff the team around so that you and the company are set out for success.

Skills

Multimodal AI models

Large-scale model training

Model deployment

Edge deployment

Model compression

Evaluation discipline

System architecture leadership

Cross-partner collaboration

Education

PhD in a quantitative field

Job description

NestAI is seeking a Model Development Lead in Europe, with a focus on battlefield-autonomy related AI, to set technical direction for an existing team and grow the group. You will own architecture, roadmap, and product-aligned decisions, while shaping the foundation model’s capabilities and deployment strategy for sovereign European control.

The role requires deep expertise in pre-training, fine-tuning, multimodal learning, and deployment trade-offs, plus the ability to collaborate with external