Lead AI Researcher: LLMs, Vision & Multimodal Systems

SmartRecruiters, Inc.; East Midlands; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private MedicalInsurance

Employee assistance programme

Life insurance & Pension Scheme

Social atmosphere & team events

Flexible working

Job summary

ALTEN seeks an experienced AI Research Lead to drive R&D and deployment of next-generation AI solutions, focusing on LLMs, VLMs, and multimodal systems. You will lead AI initiatives, design experimentation frameworks, and guide teams across research and production to deliver scalable, cutting-edge solutions.

As a technical leader, you will fine-tune foundation models, evaluate robustness and safety, and collaborate with cloud and backend engineers to transition research into production-ready

Qualifications

• Experience with LLMs and multimodal AI architectures.
• Proficiency in prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and optimization.
• Knowledge of RAG pipelines and evaluation methods.

Responsibilities

• Lead research and development across LLM, VLM, and multimodal AI.
• Design and evaluate AI models with text, image, and multimodal data.
• Develop Retrieval-Augmented Generation architectures.
• Drive experiments, benchmarking, and validation activities.
• Fine-tune foundation models for business use cases.
• Bridge research to production with engineering teams.
• Define AI architectures using cloud-native, distributed systems.
• Mentor AI engineers and researchers.
• Stay updated on AI advancements.

Skills

LLM expertise

VLMs

Prompt engineering

RAG pipelines

Multimodal AI

Model evaluation

Python development

MLOps

Cloud platforms

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in Engineering

Computer Science

Robotics

Electrical & Electronic Engineering

STEM discipline

Tools

Azure

AWS

GCP

APIs/Microservices

Job description

ALTEN seeks an experienced AI Research Lead to drive R&D and deployment of next-generation AI solutions, focusing on LLMs, VLMs, and multimodal systems. You will lead AI initiatives, design experimentation frameworks, and guide teams across research and production to deliver scalable, cutting-edge solutions.

As a technical leader, you will fine-tune foundation models, evaluate robustness and safety, and collaborate with cloud and backend engineers to transition research into production-ready