Lead, AI Systems Simulation & Inference Platform

CommonAI C.I.C.; Cambridge; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

CommonAI CIC in Cambridge is seeking a technical leader to head the engineering team building a simulation platform for AI inference systems. You will unite workloads, hardware models and measurements to predict performance and expose uncertainty to stakeholders.

You will translate scientific goals into an implementable architecture, recruit and mentor engineers, and collaborate with universities and industry partners.

Qualifications

• Substantial industrial engineering experience delivering complex software or hardware/software systems, with clear examples of technical decisions you have owned.
• Depth in at least one of systems simulation, computer architecture, distributed or HPC systems, inference serving, or experimental performance engineering. Experience across more than one is especially valuable.
• Evidence that you can lead people through difficult technical work, explain trade-offs and develop others. This may come from technical leadership and mentoring as well as formal management.
• The judgement to turn high-level scientific direction into independent engineering decisions, and to recognise when wider input is needed.
• Practical engineering ability to review code and designs, investigate failures and help colleagues resolve implementation difficulties.
• Experience using AI coding agents, with the ability to assess their output and help colleagues use them effectively.
• Experience connecting research prototypes to maintained engineering systems, collaborating with universities or technology suppliers, and comparing models with measurements would be valuable.

Responsibilities

• Own the simulator codebase, working closely with the Scientific Director, SIL on architectural decisions.
• Translate the programme's scientific goals into an achievable engineering roadmap.
• Assess existing simulators, serving software and partner components; decide what to reuse, extend or build, and establish interfaces that make the pieces work together.
• Shape recruitment, assess candidates, mentor colleagues and line-manage engineers, building complementary expertise across software, measurement, modelling and hardware.
• Ensure simulator predictions are tested against physical measurements and realistic LLM workloads, with uncertainty made explicit to the people interpreting the results.
• Establish engineering practices for maintainable software, testing, reproducible experiments and effective use of AI coding agents; review designs and results with the relevant specialists.
• Contribute directly to implementation and debugging when engineering coverage is incomplete or a colleague needs support.

Skills

Technical leadership

Systems simulation

Hardware/software integration

Mentoring

Code review

Experimentation

AI coding agents

Job description

CommonAI CIC in Cambridge is seeking a technical leader to head the engineering team building a simulation platform for AI inference systems. You will unite workloads, hardware models and measurements to predict performance and expose uncertainty to stakeholders.

You will translate scientific goals into an implementable architecture, recruit and mentor engineers, and collaborate with universities and industry partners.