Director of AI | Building and Deploying the Next Generation of Industrial AI

We’re helping a pioneering industrial AI scaleup hire a Director of AI - someone who lives at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world production deployment.

You’ll be taking the lead on applied AI within one of Europe’s most exciting and well-funded industrial AI companies. They’ve already proven product-market fit and closed a significant funding round - now it’s time to operationalise what’s been in research and aggressively push AI capability into the core product.

Over the next 6–12 months, the focus will be on one clear question:

“Which tools and models will allow us to put LLM-based AI capabilities into production?”

They’re shipping real, industrial-grade functionality powered by AI and they need someone who knows how to move from “Can we build an agent that does X?” to “It’s live, tested, monitored, and customers are using it.”

• Tackling complex engineering challenges: The company develops advanced tools that help engineers address problems once considered too difficult or resource-intensive using conventional approaches. These solutions span areas such as performance optimisation, safety testing, and advanced materials.
• Speeding up innovation cycles: The technology is designed to shorten the journey from concept to launch. By equipping engineers with powerful AI-driven capabilities, it enables faster progress across all stages of product development.
• Harnessing AI and data to drive decisions: Intelligent, data-led models learn, adapt, and predict - making it possible to anticipate issues, refine designs, and unlock new opportunities for innovation early in the process.

If you’ve worked across that bridge - between the research spikes and the production deployment - this is your domain.

What We’re Looking For

This isn’t a traditional machine learning leadership role - it’s AI-native, with an immediate focus on:

• LLM tools and platforms (e.g. LangChain, OpenAI API, Claude, Groq, HuggingFace, Vector DBs, agent frameworks)
• Deploying language-based agents into production, not just prototyping
• Moving research into the product, working side-by-side with engineering and product leadership

You’ve probably come from a background in ML, NLP, or general AI, but you’ve made the shift toward LLM-based systems in the last 6–12 months. You’re not learning this space; you’ve already spent serious time building and shipping in it.

You Might Be a Fit If You…

• Have led or been part of an applied research team, particularly with LLMs, agents, or task-specific AI systems.
• Know how to balance exploration with execution - you know how to deliver prototypes and how to get them past the finish line.
• Can work closely with engineering to productionise and monitor AI services in real environments.
• Have an opinion on tooling and infrastructure: how to build data pipelines, evaluate LLMs, and scale agents.
• Understand the difference between academic ML and applied, customer-facing systems - and have shipped things that work.
• Can advise on strategic differentiation in AI - what investments (data, partnerships, infra) move the needle and which are noise.

And as a massive bonus: you have the product thinking to ask “Is this solving a real problem for our users?” and the technical curiosity to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Why Now?

• Recently closed a major funding round - strong capital, strong momentum
• Customers across automotive, industrial, and manufacturing already seeing impact
• Backed by leading deep tech investors
• A clear shift: from research → real-time, productionised AI

You’ll be working closely with the CEO and the Interim CTO, but this is your space to own - from the architecture of the AI stack, to the tools and frameworks we use, to how we build and deploy agents at scale.

This is a greenfield opportunity to help a high-growth industrial AI company truly productise what it’s been researching. You’ll move fast, help shape the strategy, and build systems that matter - and that work.

Let’s Talk

If you’re already spending your time building LLM-powered systems, if you’re opinionated about what goes into production (and what shouldn’t), and if you’re excited to shape the applied AI roadmap for a world-class product - then this is the role for you.

Interested?