Founding AI Research Scientist

Founding AI Research Scientist | LLMs · Deep Learning · Frontier AI London (Hybrid)£80-200kMy 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 teamWhat 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 advantageousWhy 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.