Head of AI at The Portfolio Group in Manchester M4 3BG

Head of AI | Manchester (Office Based) | £90,000 + Fantastic Benefits | Reporting to: Chief Executive Officer

A genuine once in a career opportunity.

We're looking for an exceptional technical leader to own AI strategy and delivery for a sales led, essential business services provider at the forefront of digital innovation. Backed by an unrivalled track record of year on year subscription growth and part of a highly successful international Group, this organisation is now investing seriously in AI, both externally in client facing products and internally to drive efficiency across the business.

This is a rare opportunity for an existing Head of AI, or a Senior AI Engineer or AI Product Manager ready to step up, to own the full picture: strategy and hands-on delivery of production grade generative AI solutions.

What You'll Do

• Lead the design and deployment of market leading AI features across our clients' web and app based product portfolio.
• Partner with product managers, content managers, and senior stakeholders to design, build, deploy, and optimise state of the art AI, ML, LLM, and GenAI solutions.
• Use AI to broaden reach, engagement, and utilisation across our services.
• Identify opportunities to drive efficiency through AI across the wider business.
• Optimise data chunking and text embeddings for semantic search performance across a large, highly specialist text corpus.
• Track the competitive landscape and stay ahead of advances in the GenAI space.
• Govern post implementation success through clearly defined metrics.
• Analyse utilisation and user feedback to identify optimisation opportunities, reporting findings to stakeholders.
• Educate and mentor engineering staff and the broader business.

What You'll Bring

• Degree in computer science, AI, machine learning, or a related STEM field.
• Strong leader, able to communicate clearly at all levels.
• Track record deploying business critical ML models in production.
• Experience building and scaling RAG applications with semantic search and text embeddings.
• Cloud computing experience, ideally Azure, AWS, or GCP.
• Strong ML and data science fundamentals, including NLP.
• Ability to manage AI/RAG/GenAI risk and fine-tune models on proprietary datasets.
• Strong Python and SQL skills, with frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.

If you're ready to shape AI strategy from the ground up and see it through to production, at real scale, this is the role for you. In addition, you will be joining a high growth organisation with the opportunity to make immediate impact whilst diversifying your technical skillset by working closely with a highly commercial Board and C-Suite.

INDAM

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