Founding AI/ML Tech Lead

The Role

As our Founding AI/ML Tech Lead, you will be responsible for defining and implementing the technical direction of the company.

You will work closely with the Founder to identify commercially valuable AI opportunities, evaluate emerging technologies, design AI solutions, build prototypes and lead the development of production-ready products.

This is a hands-on leadership role. We are looking for someone who enjoys solving difficult problems, experimenting with new AI technologies and turning ideas into working products.

You will initially be both a technical leader and hands-on engineer, with responsibility for establishing our AI architecture, development standards and engineering practices.

Key Responsibilities

AI Strategy & Architecture

• Define the technical architecture and AI strategy for the company’s products.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies, models, frameworks and platforms.
• Select appropriate LLMs, foundation models, open-source models and supporting technologies based on cost, performance, security and business requirements.
• Design scalable AI/ML architectures for enterprise applications.
• Develop approaches for RAG, AI agents, workflow automation, document intelligence and other enterprise AI use cases.
• Establish best practices for AI evaluation, reliability, security and performance.

Product & R&D

• Lead the research, prototyping and development of new AI solutions.
• Convert business problems into practical AI solutions and technical specifications.
• Build rapid proofs of concept and minimum viable products (MVPs).
• Design and develop proprietary AI workflows, algorithms, tools and reusable components.
• Identify opportunities for creating differentiated technology and intellectual property.
• Continuously evaluate new AI research, models and tools and determine their practical commercial application.
• Develop prototypes into reliable production solutions.

Engineering Leadership

• Lead and mentor a small team of AI/ML and software engineers.
• Establish coding, testing, documentation, deployment and engineering standards.
• Conduct technical design reviews and code reviews.
• Establish CI/CD, version control, testing and monitoring practices.
• Make appropriate build-vs-buy technology decisions.
• Help recruit and develop the initial engineering team.

Enterprise Integration

• Design integrations between AI solutions and enterprise systems, APIs and data sources.
• Work with technologies such as ERP, CRM, databases, document repositories and business workflow systems.
• Ensure AI solutions can operate securely within enterprise environments.
• Consider data privacy, access control, security, auditability and compliance from the design stage.

Client Engagement

• Participate in technical discussions with prospective customers.
• Understand customer business problems and translate them into technical solutions.
• Lead technical discovery sessions and AI solution assessments.
• Demonstrate prototypes and AI capabilities to clients.
• Support solution proposals, estimates and technical documentation.

Preferred candidate profile

Required Skills & Experience

Essential

• 3-5 plus years of experience in software engineering, AI/ML engineering or a closely related field.
• Strong hands-on experience developing AI/ML applications.
• Strong Python programming skills.
• Good understanding of modern Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs).

• Practical experience with technologies such as:

• RAG
• Vector databases
• Embeddings
• Prompt engineering
• AI agents / agentic workflows
• LLM orchestration
• Model evaluation

• AI application development

• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
• Experience designing and deploying production-grade applications.
• Strong understanding of software architecture and API design.
• Experience working with relational and/or NoSQL databases.
• Good understanding of Git, CI/CD, testing and deployment practices.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to independently research new technologies and turn them into practical solutions.

Desirable

• Experience integrating AI with enterprise systems such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce or similar platforms.
• Experience in Finance, Procurement, Supply Chain, ERP or other enterprise business processes.
• Experience building AI-powered workflow automation.
• Experience…