{"id":2951781,"url":"https://alion.io/job/data-tonic-team-lead-ai-machine-learning","title":"Team Lead, AI & Machine Learning","company":{"id":2844083,"name":"Data Tonic","domain":"datatonic.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/datatonic","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":82,"open_postings":18,"ghost_share":0.222,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":68,"computed_at":"2026-10-23T05:54:15Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":110000,"max_usd":203000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":25},"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Gemini","optional":false},{"name":"Google BigQuery","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Scikit-learn","optional":false},{"name":"TensorFlow","optional":false},{"name":"Vertex AI","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-20T17:19:41Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-20","last_verified_at":"2026-10-23T23:57:51Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":3,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":2},"description":"Shape the Future of AI & Data with Us\nDatatonic is Google Cloud's 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.\nYour Mission\nAs 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.\nYou 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.\nWhat You’ll Do\n1. Hands-On Engineering & AI Systems\nDesign & Build AI Workloads: Design, deploy, and operate production-grade AI systems, including agentic workflows, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), orchestration, and foundation model fine-tuning.\n\nRigorous 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.\n\nProduction Engineering: Build robust production pipelines, serving architectures, and monitoring for AI and ML workloads on client platforms (primarily GCP).\n\nAgentic 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.\n\n2. Team Leadership & Talent Development\nPeople Management: Lead, mentor, and grow a pod of MLEs and Data Scientists, taking ownership of hiring, career development, and performance management.\n\nRetention & Engagement: Manage pod utilization, identify risks early, drive team certifications, and cultivate a high-trust, inclusive, and innovative engineering culture.\n\nTechnical Governance: Set and uphold technical standards, conduct architecture and code reviews, and define best-practice ways of working across the pod.\n\n3. Client & Strategic Leadership\nTrusted Advisory: Build strong client relationships, translating business challenges into AI system designs with explicit constraints and measurable success criteria.\n\nTechnical Communication: Articulate complex architectural and technical concepts clearly to both technical teams and senior client executive stakeholders.\n\nCross-Functional Alignment: Collaborate with Software, Data, Platform, Analytics, and UX engineers to ensure systems are usable, governable, and operable.\n\n4. Delivery & Commercial Impact\nDelivery Ownership: Own delivery quality, timelines, and scope discipline across pod engagements, surfacing scope creep as strategic expansion opportunities.\n\nAccount Depth: Proactively identify growth opportunities within existing accounts to expand client relationships beyond the initial Statement of Work (SOW).\n\nPre-Sales & Scoping: Serve as the subject matter expert in pre-sales, leading solution design, SOW scoping, and effort estimation for complex AI initiatives.\n\nPractice Initiatives: Contribute reusable assets, methodologies, evaluation suites, and public technical content to advance the broader AI practice.\n\nWhat You’ll Bring\nExperience & Skills\nProven 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.\n\nHands-On & Architectural Expertise: Strong software engineering foundations across the modern AI stack:\nClassical ML & Stats: Classical ML techniques (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn), forecasting, and feature engineering.\n\nGenerative AI & Agents: RAG, tool-calling, orchestration, guardrails, LLM-based agentic architectures, and fine-tuning.\n\nCloud & MLOps: Production deployment on cloud platforms (Google Cloud preferred: Vertex AI, BigQuery ML, Gemini).\n\nEvaluation Mindset: A track record of moving beyond exploratory notebooks to define, measure, and prove system quality with evidence and metrics.\n\nCommercial & 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.\n\nCommunication: Exceptional verbal and written communication skills to convey complex technical paradigms to diverse stakeholders.\n\nWhat’s in It for You?\nWe believe in empowering our team to thrive, with benefits including:\nHoliday: 25 days plus bank holidays (obviously!)\n\nHealth Perks: Private health insurance (Vitality Health) and Smart Health Services\n\nFitness & Wellbeing: 50% gym membership discounts (Nuffield Health, Virgin Active, Pure Gym).\n\nHybrid Model: A WFH allowance to keep you comfortable.\n\nLearning & Growth: Access to platforms like Udemy to fuel your curiosity.\n\nPension: (Auto-enrollment after probation period. 3% employer contributions raising 1% per year of service to a max of 10%)\n\nLife Insurance: (3 x your base salary!)\n\nIncome Protection: (up to 75% of base salary, up to 2 years)\n\nCycle to Work Scheme\n\nTech Scheme\n\nWhy Datatonic?\nJoin us to work alongsideAI enthusiasts anddata experts who are shaping tomorrow. At Datatonic, innovation isn’t just encouraged - it’s embedded in everything we do. If you’re ready to inspire change and deliver value at the forefront of data and AI, we’d love to hear from you!\nAre you ready to make an impact?\nApply now and take your career to the next level.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5591,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Growth opportunities","Gym membership","Health insurance","Life insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Analytics & BI Consulting","Data Engineering & Migration Services"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-20T20:21:30Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"GB","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"Licensed UK visa sponsor (Skilled Worker)","filings_12m":null,"filings_prev_12m":null,"green_card_filings_12m":null,"median_offered_wage_usd":null,"route":"Skilled Worker","cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-23T06:21:00+00:00","sources":["UK Home Office: register of licensed sponsors (workers)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":2,"expected_fill_days":68,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-23T05:54:15Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/data-tonic-team-lead-ai-machine-learning","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/data-tonic-team-lead-ai-machine-learning.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-24T02:36:27Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":4232,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-25T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":2844083},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=2844083"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fdata-tonic-team-lead-ai-machine-learning"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fdata-tonic-team-lead-ai-machine-learning"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fdata-tonic-team-lead-ai-machine-learning"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/data-tonic-team-lead-ai-machine-learning\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fdata-tonic-team-lead-ai-machine-learning"}]}