Founding AI Research Scientist

Founding AI Research Scientist | LLMs · Deep Learning · Frontier AI London (Hybrid) £80-200k My customer builds frontier AI that gives an information advantage to those solving the world's hardest problems - working with governments, national security, and private organisations in the most demanding environments. This is a founder-led research role. The CEO (AI PhD) has already built the model stack powering what the company ships today. You're the hire who takes it further - scaling it into a team and owning the entire stack. What you'll do: 🔹 Design, train and fine-tune custom deep-learning models and proprietary LLMs - architecture, training objectives, evaluation 🔹 Own a hard detection and analysis pipeline end-to-end, from raw signal to client-ready insight 🔹 Push matching and extraction beyond similarity search to precision you engineer, on models you train 🔹 Turn proprietary data - at a scale most labs never see - into models that beat commercial baselines 🔹 Set research strategy directly with the founder, then hire and lead the research team What you'll bring: ✅ Experience fine-tuning or pretraining LLMs and deep-learning models ✅ Fluency in PyTorch, comfortable owning training runs end-to-end (data → deployment) ✅ Research ambition above all - you reach for the approach that could win, not just the one that works ✅ A founder mindset: ownership, pace, comfort with ambiguity, and the discretion this work demands ✅ Eligibility for UK security clearance is advantageous Why this role: 💰 A defining, founding research role - senior compensation plus meaningful equity 📊 A proprietary dataset at a scale you can't get anywhere else, aimed at a mission that matters 🔓 Real ownership and founder-level access - the freedom to do genuine research 📩 To discuss this confidential opportunity, get in touch directly.