Head of Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI)

Head of Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) | Manchester | £130-150k + Car Allowance + Bonus Scheme

This is a once-in-a-career opportunity for an exceptional technical leader to take ownership of the AI agenda within a large, award-winning international services group, recognised across business intelligence, compliance and consultancy. Reporting directly to C-suite leadership, you will shape the strategic direction of the group's AI capability at a pivotal moment in its growth, while remaining deeply hands-on in its design and delivery.

You will lead the creation of cutting-edge, market-leading Generative AI solutions, including our proprietary AI product that enables our client base to interact with our business intelligence, compliance and consultancy services through generative AI models and agents, delivering genuinely interactive, intelligent engagement across the client journey. As a hands-on leader, you'll drive continual improvement, liaising with Technology leads across the group to share best practice, with full autonomy to build and shape the AI function as your own.

What You'll Do

Lead the design and deployment of a market-leading RAG conversational agent, working with a large, complex proprietary dataset.

Partner with product managers, content managers and senior stakeholders to design, develop, deploy and optimise state-of-the-art AI/ML/LLM/GenAI solutions against business and user requirements.

Optimise LLMs, datasets and agent workflows to the highest quality standards, detecting and mitigating hallucinations and output errors.

Deploy and maintain RAG architecture and LLM pipelines within cloud environments.

Optimise data-chunking and text embeddings for optimal semantic search across a large, specialist corpus.

Track the competitive landscape and stay current with technological advancements in GenAI.

Monitor and optimise agent and model latency and performance.

Analyse utilisation and user feedback to identify experience-optimisation opportunities, and report findings to stakeholders.

Educate and mentor engineering staff and the broader business.

Required Skills & Experience

Strong Python proficiency for production-grade AI development, with hands-on experience across LlamaIndex, LangChain and LangGraph.

Proven track record building and scaling RAG systems; Graph-RAG exposure a distinct advantage.

Practical experience with model adaptation techniques - prompting, fine-tuning, instruction tuning or knowledge distillation.

Solid grounding in evaluation and experimentation methodology, with a focus on correctness, faithfulness and robustness.

Demonstrable experience owning the technical design and delivery of complex AI, ML or data-driven systems in live production, ideally within a large or multi-division organisation.

Senior engineering leadership or Head of AI-level background - able to balance rapid experimentation with disciplined production delivery, and communicate clearly with executive stakeholders including the COO, CEO and Technology leads.

This is a chance to work at the forefront of applied Generative AI within a large, international services group, where your contributions will directly shape customer-facing products and drive measurable business impact. You'll bring genuine technical ownership and autonomy, backed by a world-class leadership team with a clear, ambitious AI roadmap.

INDAM

The Portfolio Group are acting on behalf of our client in recruiting for this position.