Team Lead, AI & Machine Learning

Datatonic; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Holiday: 25 days + bank holidays

Private health insurance

Pension (Auto-enrollment)

Life Insurance

Income Protection

Cycle to Work Scheme

Tech Scheme

WFH allowance

Job summary

Datatonic is seeking a Pod Lead to bridge high-level technical leadership and hands-on engineering for production AI systems. You will mentor a pod of AI Engineers, design and deploy AI workloads, and evaluate system performance, while growing client relationships and driving delivery excellence in a hybrid work model.

You will own end-to-end delivery quality, be a key technical architect, and contribute to pre-sales and expansion opportunities across existing accounts.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in machine learning, data science, or applied AI, with leadership experience.
• Hands-on engineering and architectural expertise across the modern AI stack.
• Experience with generative AI, agents, RAG, tool-calling, and orchestration.
• Cloud & MLOps experience focusing on production deployment on cloud platforms.
• Proven ability to move from notebooks to measurable system quality.
• Client-facing consulting or pre-sales experience preferred.
• Excellent communication to diverse stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate production-grade AI systems.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a pod of AI engineers and data scientists.
• Own delivery quality, timelines, and scope across engagements.
• Identify growth opportunities within accounts and assist in pre-sales.

Skills

Proven Track Record

Hands-On & Architectural Expertise

Generative AI & Agents

Cloud & MLOps

Evaluation Mindset

Commercial & Client Savvy

Communication

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

scikit-learn

Vertex AI

BigQuery ML

Job description

Shape the Future of AI & Data with Us

Datatonic is Google Cloud's premier AI and data partner, specializing in designing, building, and operating production AI systems. We combine software engineering, machine learning, data engineering, and analytics on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with top-tier consulting skills to turn complex business requirements into reliable, production-grade products.

Your Mission

As a Pod Lead, you will bridge high-level technical leadership, hands‑on engineering execution, team leadership and consulting. You will lead, mentor, and grow a dedicated pod of AI Engineers while directly designing, deploying, and evaluating cutting‑edge AI systems.

You will own end-to-end project delivery quality, account growth, and team performance while remaining a key technical architect and direct builder on production workloads.

What You’ll Do

1. Hands-On Engineering & AI Systems

• Design & Build AI Workloads: Design, deploy, and operate production-grade AI systems, including agentic workflows, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), orchestration, and foundation model fine‑tuning.

• Rigorous Evaluation: Build evaluation frameworks, define success criteria, and measure system performance using offline metrics, online quality monitoring, human‑in‑the‑loop reviews, and failure‑mode analysis.

• Production Engineering: Build robust production pipelines, serving architectures, and monitoring for AI and ML workloads on client platforms (primarily GCP).

• Agentic Delivery: Use coding and research agents daily in delivery, and build custom agents for evaluation suites, prompt/tool regression, data labeling, and repeatable team workflows.

2. Team Leadership & Talent Development

• People Management: Lead, mentor, and grow a pod of MLEs and Data Scientists, taking ownership of hiring, career development, and performance management.

• Retention & Engagement: Manage pod utilization, identify risks early, drive team certifications, and cultivate a high-trust, inclusive, and innovative engineering culture.

• Technical Governance: Set and uphold technical standards, conduct architecture and code reviews, and define best‑practice ways of working across the pod.

3. Client & Strategic Leadership

• Trusted Advisory: Build strong client relationships, translating business challenges into AI system designs with explicit constraints and measurable success criteria.

• Technical Communication: Articulate complex architectural and technical concepts clearly to both technical teams and senior client executive stakeholders.

• Cross-Functional Alignment: Collaborate with Software, Data, Platform, Analytics, and UX engineers to ensure systems are usable, governable, and operable.

4. Delivery & Commercial Impact

• Delivery Ownership: Own delivery quality, timelines, and scope discipline across pod engagements, surfacing scope creep as strategic expansion opportunities.

• Account Depth: Proactively identify growth opportunities within existing accounts to expand client relationships beyond the initial Statement of Work (SOW).

• Pre-Sales & Scoping: Serve as the subject matter expert in pre‑sales, leading solution design, SOW scoping, and effort estimation for complex AI initiatives.

• Practice Initiatives: Contribute reusable assets, methodologies, evaluation suites, and public technical content to advance the broader AI practice.

What You’ll Bring

Experience & Skills

• Proven Track Record: 7+ years of experience in machine learning, data science, or applied AI, with at least 2+ years leading technical teams or projects end-to-end.

• Hands-On & Architectural Expertise: Strong software engineering foundations across the modern AI stack:

  • Classic ML & Stats: Classical ML techniques (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn), forecasting, and feature engineering.

  • Generative AI & Agents: RAG, tool-calling, orchestration, guardrails, LLM-based agentic architectures, and fine‑tuning.

  • Cloud & MLOps: Production deployment on cloud platforms (Google Cloud preferred: Vertex AI, BigQuery ML, Gemini).

• Evaluation Mindset: A track record of moving beyond exploratory notebooks to define, measure, and prove system quality with evidence and metrics.

• Commercial & Client Savvy: Experience in client-facing consulting or pre-sales environments, with comfort operating at the intersection of technical execution, delivery management, and account growth.

• Communication: Exceptional verbal and written communication skills to convey complex technical paradigms to diverse stakeholders.

What’s in It for You?

We believe in empowering our team to thrive, with benefits including:

• Holiday: 25 days plus bank holidays (obviously!)

• Health Perks: Private health insurance (Vitality Health) and Smart Health Services

• Fitness & Wellbeing: 50% gym membership discounts (Nuffield Health, Virgin Active, Pure Gym).

• Hybrid Model: A WFH allowance to keep you comfortable.

• Learning & Growth: Access to platforms like Udemy to fuel your curiosity.

• Pension: (Auto-enrollment after probation period. 3% employer contributions raising 1% per year of service to a max of 10%)

• Life Insurance: (3 x your base salary!)

• Income Protection: (up to 75% of base salary, up to 2 years)

• Cycle to Work Scheme

• Tech Scheme

Why Datatonic?

Join us to work alongside AI enthusiasts and data experts who are shaping tomorrow. At Datatonic, innovation isn’t just encouraged - it’s embedded in everything we do. If you’re ready to inspire change and deliver value at the forefront of data and AI, we’d love to hear from you!

Are you ready to make an impact?