Burton Recruitment Limited
Technical Lead, Machine Learning
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Location: United Kingdom | Hybrid / Flexible Highly competitive package + equity
We are working with a well-funded AI startup building its core technical team from the ground up, and are looking for an exceptional Technical Lead / Staff Machine Learning Engineer to take significant ownership of its machine learning systems.
This is a senior technical leadership position for somebody who still wants to build.
You’ll join at an unusually early stage, work alongside the founding team and have a genuine voice in how the ML platform, technical standards and wider product evolve.
Rather than sitting several layers away from the technology, you will be directly responsible for turning research and model capabilities into reliable, scalable systems that work in the real world.
The Opportunity
You will sit at the intersection of machine learning, infrastructure, research and product engineering. Your remit will include:
- Owning end-to-end ML system execution
- Designing training workflows, data pipelines and evaluation systems
- Fine-tuning and adapting large models
- Building and operating scalable inference infrastructure
- Optimising GPU utilisation, memory, latency and cost
- Developing synthetic and real-world training data systems
- Building model evaluation frameworks covering performance, robustness and safety
- Deploying models into production
- Working with engineering teams to integrate ML capabilities into user-facing products
- Providing technical direction and raising the engineering bar across ML
- Making pragmatic decisions and shipping improvements quickly
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You may work with approaches including:
- LoRA
- QLoRA
- SFT
- DPO
- Distillation
and technologies including:
- Python
- PyTorch
- JAX
- GPU training & inference
What We’re Looking For
We’re interested in people who have:
- Built and shipped real production ML systems, not simply experiments or demos
- Strong experience working with large models
- A strong understanding of model behaviour and failure modes
- Excellent production software engineering ability
- Experience with scalable training and/or inference
- Strong understanding of performance, reliability and optimisation
- The confidence to make significant technical decisions independently
- A high level of ownership and curiosity
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We are equally interested in outstanding Staff/Principal ML Engineers, ML Leads and senior applied researchers who have the capability to operate at this level.
Why Join?
You would be joining the founding technical team, not a large established ML department. That means the decisions you make now can become the architecture, standards and ways of working that the company builds upon for years.
You’ll have significant technical autonomy, direct exposure to leadership, equity participation and the opportunity to see your work translate directly into an AI product intended to operate at global scale.
For someone who wants technical influence without giving up the joy of actually building, this is an unusually strong opportunity.
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