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.