AI Model Lead
Damstra Technology
Software Engineering, Data Science
AI Model Lead
- Job ID
- 2026-2910
- # of Openings
- 1
- Category
- Architecture and Engineering
- Role type
- Permanent
- Working
- Remote
- Name
- Nottingham
Role Purpose
Location- Ruddington, Nottinghamshire
Level - Team Leader/Professional
Department - Product R&D
Working Pattern - Remote unless based locally
Benefits - Benefits at Ideagen
Salary - To be discussed at next stage
Ideagen is building domain-specific AI models for environments where accuracy, traceability, and accountability matter. As AI Models Lead, you will take technical ownership of how language models are adapted, evaluated, and promoted into production across EHS, Quality, and GRC workflows. This is a senior, hands-on engineering leadership role with responsibility for setting the technical standard for fine-tuning at scale, from data and evaluation design through to production-ready adapter libraries.
You will lead the AI Models Team and work closely with domain experts, platform engineers, and AI leadership to ensure models behave correctly in regulated industry contexts. This role combines deep technical execution with people leadership and offers a clear growth path as Ideagen’s AI organisation continues to scale.
Responsibilities
- Leading and developing the AI Models Team, setting engineering standards, mentoring engineers, and establishing a strong technical culture
- Designing and owning the end-to-end fine-tuning methodology, including training configuration, evaluation gates, reproducibility standards, and promotion criteria
- Making base model selection decisions across foundation model families, balancing capability, cost, and inference constraints for different domain tasks
- Owning LoRA and QLoRA adaptation strategy, including configuration choices, training compute decisions, and compatibility with the inference layer
- Applying supervised fine-tuning and preference optimisation techniques to domain-specific classification and compliance problems
- Building robust evaluation frameworks with domain experts to assess whether models are performing correctly in real EHS, Quality, and GRC use cases
- Leading dataset design and construction, defining labelling standards and ensuring training data is versioned, auditable, and reproducible
- Owning production training and adapter lifecycle management, from large-scale training jobs through to registry promotion and release readiness
Skills and Experience
- You have a proven track record of fine-tuning language models that serve real production traffic, with a strong understanding of operational failure modes
- Deep practical experience with LoRA and QLoRA, and clear intuition for the trade-offs between quality, compute cost, and inference performance
- Hands-on experience applying alignment techniques such as supervised fine-tuning and preference optimisation to real-world problems
- Strong tooling fluency with modern ML frameworks and experimentation platforms, including debugging and scaling training pipelines
- High-quality Python engineering skills, with emphasis on readable, testable, and maintainable training and evaluation code
- Experience leading or mentoring engineers in a technical ML environment, with a people-first approach to leadership
- Comfortable working with subject-matter experts to define “what good looks like” when evaluation requires real domain judgment
- Background or interest in regulated domains such as EHS, quality management, healthcare, or financial services is advantageous
About Ideagen
If your application meets the requirements for this role, our Talent Acquisition team will be in touch to guide you through the next steps.
To ensure a flexible and inclusive process, please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments by contacting us at recruitment@ideagen.com. All matters will be treated with strict confidence.
At Ideagen, we value the importance of work-life balance and welcome candidates seeking flexible arrangements. If this is something you are interested in, please let us know during the application process. Enhance your career and make the world a safer place!
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