Lead AI Research: Multimodal & LLMs

ALTEN Group; Portsmouth; 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

Social atmosphere & team events

Flexible working

Job summary

ALTEN is seeking an experienced AI Research Lead to drive R&D and deployment of next‑gen AI solutions, focusing on LLMs, VLMs, CV, and multimodal systems. Bridge research and production, lead experiments, and provide technical leadership across multimodal projects.

You will design scalable architectures in cloud environments, mentor AI engineers, stay current with AI advances, and translate research into production‑ready solutions. Security clearance may be required.

Qualifications

• Experience with LLMs and VLMs, including prompt engineering and model optimisation.
• Design and implement RAG pipelines for retrieval augmented generation.
• Experience building multimodal AI systems with vision-language capabilities.
• Knowledge of evaluating model performance, robustness, and safety.
• Strong Python development and API/service design.
• Experience with cloud platforms and MLOps workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead research across LLM, VLM, and multimodal AI domains.
• Design and evaluate AI models with text, image, and multimodal reasoning.
• Develop and optimise RAG architectures.
• Drive experimentation, benchmarking, and validation activities.
• Fine-tune foundation models for business use cases.
• Collaborate with engineering to productionize research outputs.
• Define AI architectures in cloud-native, distributed environments.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to AI engineers and researchers.
• Stay current with AI research and industry advancements.

Skills

LLMs

VLMs

Prompt engineering

RAG pipelines

Multimodal AI

Model evaluation

Python

APIs

Docker

Kubernetes

Azure

Education

Bachelor’s/Master’s in Engineering

Computer Science

Artificial Intelligence

Robotics

Electrical & Electronic Engineering

Related STEM discipline

Tools

Python

APIs

Docker

Kubernetes

Azure

MLOps

Job description

ALTEN is seeking an experienced AI Research Lead to drive R&D and deployment of next‑gen AI solutions, focusing on LLMs, VLMs, CV, and multimodal systems. Bridge research and production, lead experiments, and provide technical leadership across multimodal projects.

You will design scalable architectures in cloud environments, mentor AI engineers, stay current with AI advances, and translate research into production‑ready solutions. Security clearance may be required.