VP of Engineering – AI

Bjak; City Of London; On-site; GBP 125,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

A self-funded AI group in the UK seeks a founding executive-level engineer to lead the development of critical AI systems. You'll shape engineering culture and strategy, while personally building core infrastructure and ensuring product delivery. The ideal candidate has over 10 years of engineering experience and a proven track record in shipping AI products. If you excel in a fast-paced, high-performance environment and value ownership, this role is for you.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience.
• Proven track record shipping AI-heavy products.
• Experience leading engineers by example.

Responsibilities

• Personally build and maintain core AI infrastructure.
• Design model training, evaluation, and deployment pipelines.
• Act as the final technical decision-maker.

Skills

Deep ML expertise

Strong Python coding ability

Engineering leadership

Job description

Build, scale, and uphold the technical backbone of a global AI product - while leading by example through real systems and real code.

A1 is a self-funded AI group, operating in full stealth. We’re building a new global consumer AI application where long-term success depends on deep technical rigor, strong execution, and disciplined engineering culture.

This is a founding executive-level engineering role. You will personally build critical AI systems while shaping engineering culture, hiring strategy, and long-term technical direction. This is not a pure management role - you lead by building.

Why This Role Matters

• You set the technical and cultural foundation of the AI organization
• You own AI quality, reliability, and scalability end-to-end
• You balance research ambition with real product delivery
• You act as the final technical decision-maker

What You’ll Do

• Personally build and maintain core AI infrastructure
• Design model training, evaluation, and deployment pipelines
• Debug and resolve production AI failures
• Review and merge critical PRs
• Define standards for model lifecycle and experimentation
• Design org structure and hiring strategy
• Align AI roadmap with business goals

Requirements

• 10+ years of engineering experience
• Deep ML expertise across training, tuning, and evaluation
• Proven track record shipping AI-heavy products
• Strong Python-heavy coding ability
• Experience leading engineers by example

Nice to Have

• Built ML systems from zero
• Comfortable reading and implementing research
• Strong intuition for model, data, and infrastructure tradeoffs

Our Team & Culture

We operate as a dense, senior, high-performance team. We value clarity, speed, craftsmanship, and relentless ownership. We behave like founders — we build, ship, iterate, and hold ourselves to a high technical bar.

If you value excellence, enjoy building real systems, and want to be part of a small team creating something globally impactful, you’ll thrive here.

About A1

A1 is a self-funded, independent AI group, focused on building a new consumer AI product with global impact. We’re assembling a small, elite team of ML and engineering builders who want to work on meaningful, high-impact problems.