Our client is a leading quantitative investment fund with a highly sophisticated research and technology platform. As part of the continued expansion of its systematic investment capabilities, we have been retained to identify an exceptional Head of Machine Learning to lead its Natural Language Processing research function.
This is a highly technical, hands-on leadership role for an individual with deep expertise in NLP and Large Language Models (LLMs), who is excited by the opportunity to apply cutting-edge language modelling techniques directly to quantitative investment strategies.
The successful candidate will lead a team of highly talented researchers and engineers, while remaining actively involved in the research and development of NLP-driven quantitative strategies.
As Head of NLP, you will own the firm's NLP research agenda, combining technical leadership with hands-on research.
A significant focus of the role will be the training, fine-tuning and optimisation of large language models for financial applications. You will investigate how increasingly sophisticated language models can be trained to extract information, identify patterns and generate differentiated signals from large and complex textual datasets.
You will work closely with quantitative researchers, portfolio managers and engineers to take ideas from initial research through to NLP-driven quantitative strategies and production systems.
The role will include:
- Actively developing NLP-driven quantitative strategies, working directly with quantitative researchers to identify and exploit signals within unstructured data.
- Leading the research and development of large language models, with a particular focus on training, fine-tuning, evaluation and optimisation.
- Developing bespoke approaches to fine-tune LLMs for financial and investment-specific applications.
- Working with large-scale textual datasets, including news, company filings, earnings transcripts, research and other alternative data sources.
- Investigating techniques across transformers, representation learning, embeddings, supervised and self-supervised learning, instruction tuning and retrieval-augmented generation.
- Designing rigorous experiments to evaluate model performance and determine whether NLP-derived outputs translate into robust investment signals.
- Working closely with quantitative researchers to integrate NLP models and signals into systematic investment strategies.
- Staying at the forefront of developments in LLMs and determining which advances have genuine potential to improve the firm's research capabilities.
- Building the infrastructure, research methodologies and technical standards required to train and evaluate models at scale.
- Managing and developing a team of NLP researchers and engineers, setting the technical direction while remaining deeply involved in the underlying research.
We are looking for an individual who is deeply technical first and foremost, but who has the seniority and leadership capability to build and manage a high-performing NLP research team.
You are likely to have:
- Significant experience in NLP, machine learning and/or LLM research.
- Extensive hands-on experience training and fine-tuning large language models.
- A strong understanding of transformer architectures and modern deep-learning techniques.
- Experience working with large-scale datasets and computationally intensive model-training environments.
- A track record of taking sophisticated research ideas from experimentation through to practical application.
- The intellectual curiosity to investigate genuinely novel approaches rather than simply applying established techniques.
- Experience managing, mentoring or leading a team of highly technical researchers.
- Strong quantitative and statistical thinking, with a rigorous approach to experimentation and model evaluation.
- Excellent programming skills, particularly in Python and modern ML frameworks.
- An interest in financial markets and the potential applications of NLP to systematic investing.
Experience within a quantitative hedge fund or systematic investment environment would be advantageous, particularly where you have directly contributed to alpha generation or quantitative strategy development. However, we are equally interested in exceptional NLP/LLM researchers from leading technology companies, AI labs and academia who are excited by the opportunity to apply their expertise to financial markets.
A genuinely technical leadership role
This is not a traditional management position. The successful candidate will be expected to remain close to the research — experimenting with models, shaping architectures, fine-tuning LLMs and working alongside quantitative researchers to develop new investment signals.
At the same time, you will have the seniority and autonomy to build and lead a team, establish the firm's NLP research direction and influence how language AI is incorporated into its broader systematic investment platform.
For an exceptional NLP/LLM researcher, this represents an opportunity to work at the intersection of cutting-edge language modelling, quantitative research and financial markets, with a direct connection between technical innovation and investment outcomes.