💻 Job Title: Head of AI (Research)
🤑 Salary: €200-250k
📈 Equity: up to 0.6% (currently valued at €650k - will be worth $6m at unicorn status which they're expecting to reach in ~4 years)
📍 Location: fully remote anywhere in Europe (quarterly team get togethers)
🔐 Company: Cyber Security SaaS start-up building AI agents to identify and resolve cloud vulnerabilities
👥 Team: ~25 (aiming for 35+ by year end)
💸 Funding: $30m+ Series A
Are you looking for the next big thing and want to work on novel products? 🚀
👉 If you’ve led AI research, built prototypes that turned into products and want to architect the future of intelligent security, this could be your defining role at a well-funded start-up, operating at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity.
We’re searching for an AI leader to set the vision, shape the research agenda and turn cutting-edge ideas into real-world impact. Working closely with the CTO, you'll own the end-to-end AI strategy, drive innovation with LLMs and agent systems, guide a growing team of top talent and translate research into breakthrough product capabilities that protect organisations worldwide.
This role is for someone who thrives at combining deep technical expertise with strategic leadership, and is eager to define the standards of how AI transforms security.
🫵 What you'll do:
- Define the AI vision: Develop and own the long-term strategy for applying machine learning and generative models to solve complex security problems.
- Turn research into products: Build prototypes of new techniques, validate them and work with engineering to transform them into customer-facing features.
- Establish evaluation standards: Design systems and benchmarks that measure the performance of LLMs, agents and AI-driven workflows in real-world security contexts.
- Raise the technical bar: Provide architectural guidance, review implementations, and ensure quality across all AI-related initiatives.
- Build and grow the team: Hire, mentor and lead AI talent, fostering a culture of innovation and excellence.
✅ Must have requirements:
- Deep LLM, NLP, GenAI and Agentic AI expertise - you must have hands-on experience with modern transformer architectures, autonomous agent systems, fine-tuning techniques, evaluations and agent frameworks
- A track record of guiding teams and shaping AI direction at leading research labs, major tech companies or fast-moving startups (think DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google or similar)
- Ability to move quickly from research phase to working prototypes to scalable production systems.
- Experience applying AI research to practical business challenges and measuring success through user and market impact.
- Strong engineering foundation with a software development background (ideally in Python) and the ability to design, review and critique complex architectures.
- Security consciousness - understanding of vulnerability management
👍 Bonus points for:
- Cybersecurity domain knowledge or experience applying AI to security challenges
- Advanced academic credentials (PhD or equivalent) with publications in respected conferences/journals.
- Familiarity with AI safety, benchmarking, and responsible deployment practices.
