AI Research Lead — Multimodal & LLM Innovation

ALTEN; East Midlands; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private Medical Insurance

Cycle & Tech Scheme

Employee assistance programme

Life insurance & Pension Scheme

Flexible way of working

Social atmosphere

Job summary

ALTEN is seeking an experienced AI Research Lead to drive R&D and deployment of next‑generation AI solutions focused on LLMs, VLMs, computer vision, and multimodal AI systems. You will lead research, design scalable AI architectures, and mentor engineers to deliver production-ready solutions.

You will design and optimise RAG pipelines, evaluate model performance, and stay at the forefront of AI advancements, collaborating with cross‑functional teams in a dynamic, hybrid work environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Robotics, Electrical Engineering or related STEM discipline.
• Experience with AI model deployment and production-ready services is desirable.

Responsibilities

• Lead research and development across LLM, VLM and multimodal AI domains.
• Design, implement, and evaluate AI models with text, image, and multimodal inputs.
• Develop and optimise Retrieval-Augmented Generation architectures.
• Drive experiments, benchmarking and validation activities.
• Fine-tune foundation models for business use cases.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to transition research into production.

Skills

LLMs

VLMs

Prompt engineering

RAG pipelines

Multimodal AI

Model evaluation

Python development

APIs

MLOps

Cloud computing

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Engineering or related STEM fields

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Azure Kubernetes Service

Git

REST APIs

CI/CD

Job description

ALTEN is seeking an experienced AI Research Lead to drive R&D and deployment of next‑generation AI solutions focused on LLMs, VLMs, computer vision, and multimodal AI systems. You will lead research, design scalable AI architectures, and mentor engineers to deliver production-ready solutions.

You will design and optimise RAG pipelines, evaluate model performance, and stay at the forefront of AI advancements, collaborating with cross‑functional teams in a dynamic, hybrid work environment.