AI & Machine Learning
The people who teach the machines.
Applied AI engineers, ML platform, research-to-production. From foundation models to fine-tuning.
AI & ML at Northstack
Our fastest-growing practice. We hire Applied AI Engineers, Machine Learning Engineers, and the senior leadership of AI and ML organisations across the UK’s most ambitious technology and AI-native businesses.
The work has changed substantially over the last two years. Three years ago this practice was running classical ML engineering searches for businesses with established ML infrastructure. Today most of our briefs are at AI-native or AI-first scale-ups, foundation model labs, or businesses building applied AI products into existing platforms.
Where we focus
Applied AI Engineering — the engineers who build, evaluate, and ship AI-powered product features. The shape of the role has standardised in the last year: prompt engineering, evaluation infrastructure, RAG systems, and the careful work of putting LLM-backed features into production responsibly.
ML Platform Engineering — the engineers who build the internal infrastructure that ML teams consume. Feature stores, training pipelines, inference serving. Less glamorous than the applied work, often the bottleneck on shipping ML at speed.
AI/ML Leadership — Heads of AI, Heads of ML, the small number of VPE-level leadership roles in AI-native businesses, and the increasingly senior research-to-production hires at foundation model labs.
Who to talk to
Tariq Ahmed leads AI & ML. For any AI or ML brief — senior IC or leadership — Tariq is the right first conversation.
2 live briefs
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Senior ML role at a Series A foundation model platform business. Real research-to-production work, real ownership, real equity.
VP of Engineering
Lead a 70-person engineering org through Series C scale. AI applied to biomedical research, with a CEO worth working for.
A ai & machine learning brief we should be working on?
Tell us about the role. We'll respond within one working day with a view on what the brief should actually be, where it should sit in the market, and whether it's the kind of work we do well.