Team Lead, AI & Machine Learning

Datatonic is Google Clouds 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.

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.

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.

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:

  • Classical 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.

Whats 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 isnt just encouraged - its embedded in everything we do. If youre ready to inspire change and deliver value at the forefront of data and AI wed love to hear from you!

Are you ready to make an impact

Apply now and take your career to the next level.

Required Experience:

Manager