AI Lead, Engineer & Researcher, Ref: 088

Role Type

AI Lead, Engineer, Researcher, Founding Engineer, AI Advisor

Skills / Experience

AI/ML Engineering, AI/ML Research, Software Engineering, Business Leadership

Availability

Immediate

Contract Preference

Contract or Fractional. Permanent considered for outstanding role

Salary / Rate Expectation

Negotiable

Profile

Impact-driven AI Leader, Engineer & Researcher, delivering at every stage from AI research to real-world delivery.

AI Leader with over three years of experience spanning research, engineering, and startup leadership, making them a versatile asset for innovative teams. Their expertise in cutting-edge AI research, including SOTA computer vision, NLP, and generative AI, is complemented by proven success in commercialising advanced technologies into products and pilots that have progressed from TRL 2 to 6. They have led industry-first projects such as “text-to-game” workflows and 3D AI copilots, demonstrating their ability to bridge research and real-world delivery. Their strong track record of securing funding, building teams, and establishing strategic partnerships underscores their capacity to drive impactful AI initiatives.

Preference for computer vision and multi-modal AI, but also has experience of building language systems with LLMs. Likes early stage companies and would prefer to stay technical – Founding Engineer/AI Advisor/AI Engineer type roles. Hybrid in London.

Skills

Business Leadership: Startup founding, team building, management, stakeholder engagement (investors/clients). AI/ML

Research: Research lead, SOTA computer vision and NLP research, conferences, academic papers, PyTorch. AI/ML

Engineering: Visual AI systems, GenAI, RAG, 3D AI prototypes, OpenAI, HuggingFace. Software Engineering: Python, C#, JS, Azure, AWS, Docker, Git, SQL, MongoDB, Weaviate, Redis, FastAPI.

Experience

2024 – 2025 Founder & CEO

Lead vision, people and tech at the intersection of generative AI, computer vision, robotics, and 3D design.
Pioneered industry-first “text-to-game” workflows with gaming studios as a technical product manager
Orchestrated and led academic research collaborations – 5 projects including AI memory and multimodal AI
Spearheaded commercialisation : grants, private capital, commercial partnerships, hiring.
Advanced SOTA AI research into products and commercial pilots from TRL 2 →6 (active developer/researcher)

Keywords: Startup Leadership, Deep Tech, GenAI, 3D AI, AI for Robotics, AI for Gaming, AI for Architecture

2024 Contract AI Lead

Established the company’s AI department with UKRI grant funding (Generative AI for 3D automation)
Led AI strategy and governance ; initiated partnerships across academia, research, and investment
Delivered industry-first “3D copilots” for automated 3D scene generation within architecture (Public demo)
Owned end-to-end product design, development and delivery – scalable cloud microservices (AWS, Azure)
Pioneered novel “3D RAG” pipelines using vector search and prompt engineering

Keywords: 3D AI, GenAI, RAG, VLMs, MongoDB, S3, Weaviate, Docker, Azure, AWS, Blender, UE5

2022 – 2024 Software Engineering Consultant

Co-architected and built continental-scale software systems for Volvo Cars from zero code to continental expansion, handling £200M+ in assets. Liaised with 17 client teams
Delivered full-stack, event-driven, cloud-native solution, led in-house data analytics strategy

2021 – 2022 Director & Principal Scientist

Proposed, secured and led AI-driven real-time analytics project
Developed state-of-the-art AI forecasting models for COVID-19-risk, yielding 15% improvement in KPIs
Lead a European Transport Conference workshop; Global Top 10 in Tech Challenge

2018 – 2022 Director & Social Enterprise Leader

Built a 30-member cross-functional team ; delivering educational media products; 150% CAGR (engagement)
Earned a Global Citizenship Award for international community engagement and outreach services

Projects

JEPA Maintainer: Developed open-source implementations of state-of-the-art visual AI models (JEPA)

Industrial Qualifications: Self-Driving Cars (University of Tubingen), Deep Learning Specialisation (online)

Education

2021 MEng Mechanical Engineering – 1st Class Hons, Outstanding Award

Masters Thesis – Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, Statistics, Data Visualisation, Project Management

Bachelors Thesis – Computer Vision, Software Development, Process Analytics

Awards

BTA UK AI Awards – Finalist, 2025

Bristol Futures Outstanding Award, 2021

Tech Challenge National and International Finalist, 2019

Beijing Institute of Technology – Social Value Award, 2019

For further information on this candidate please use reference number: 088

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