---
title: 'Team Lead, AI & Machine Learning at Datatonic'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/team-lead-ai-machine-learning-datatonic-london-nrnyjd0v1bcv'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-31'
---

# Team Lead, AI & Machine Learning at Datatonic

- **Company:** Datatonic
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-31
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/datatonic/c2c970b3-d5f4-45dd-bb16-419e0d01dff0

## Job description

Shape the Future of AI & Data with Us Datatonic is Google Cloud's premier AI and data partner, specializing in designing, building, and operating production AI systems. We combine software engineering, machine learning, data engineering, and analytics on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with top-tier consulting skills to turn complex business requirements into reliable, production-grade products.

## Your Mission

As a Pod Lead, you will bridge high-level technical leadership, hands-on engineering execution, team leadership and consulting. You will lead, mentor, and grow a dedicated pod of AI Engineers while directly designing, deploying, and evaluating cutting-edge AI systems. You will own end-to-end project delivery quality, account growth, and team performance while remaining a key technical architect and direct builder on production workloads.

## What You’ll Do

1. Hands-On Engineering & AI Systems

- Design & Build AI Workloads: Design, deploy, and operate production-grade AI systems, including agentic workflows, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), orchestration, and foundation model fine-tuning.
- Rigorous Evaluation: Build evaluation frameworks, define success criteria, and measure system performance using offline metrics, online quality monitoring, human-in-the-loop reviews, and failure-mode analysis.
- Production Engineering: Build robust production pipelines, serving architectures, and monitoring for AI and ML workloads on client platforms (primarily GCP).
- Agentic Delivery: Use coding and research agents daily in delivery, and build custom agents for evaluation suites, prompt/tool regression, data labeling, and repeatable team workflows.

1. Team Leadership & Talent Development

- People Management: Lead, mentor, and grow a pod of MLEs and Data Scientists, taking ownership of hiring, career development, and performance management.
- Retention & Engagement: Manage pod utilization, identify risks early, drive team certifications, and cultivate a high-trust, inclusive, and innovative engineering culture.
- Technical Governance: Set and uphold technical standards, conduct architecture and code reviews, and define best-practice ways of working across the pod.

1. Client & Strategic Leadership

- Trusted Advisory: Build strong client relationships, translating business challenges into AI system designs with explicit constraints and measurable success criteria.
- Technical Communication: Articulate complex architectural and technical concepts clearly to both technical teams and senior client executive stakeholders.
- Cross-Functional Alignment: Collaborate with Software, Data, Platform, Analytics, and UX engineers to ensure systems are usable, governable, and operable.

1. Delivery & Commercial Impact

- Delivery Ownership: Own delivery quality, timelines, and scope discipline across pod engagements, surfacing scope creep as strategic expansion opportunities.
- Account Depth: Proactively identify growth opportunities within existing accounts to expand client relationships beyond the initial Statement of Work (SOW).
- Pre-Sales & Scoping: Serve as the subject matter expert in pre-sales, leading solution design, SOW scoping, and effort estimation for complex AI initiatives.
- Practice Initiatives: Contribute reusable assets, methodologies, evaluation suites, and public technical content to advance the broader AI practice.

## What You’ll Bring

## Experience & Skills

- Proven Track Record: 7+ years of experience in machine learning, data science, or applied AI, with at least 2+ years leading technical teams or projects end-to-end.
- Hands-On & Architectural Expertise: Strong software engineering foundations across the modern AI stack:
- Classical ML & Stats: Classical ML techniques (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn), forecasting, and feature engineering.
- Generative AI & Agents: RAG, tool-calling, orchestration, guardrails, LLM-based agentic architectures, and fine-tuning.
- Cloud & MLOps: Production deployment on cloud platforms (Google Cloud preferred: Vertex AI, BigQuery ML, Gemini).
- Evaluation Mindset: A track record of moving beyond exploratory notebooks to define, measure, and prove system quality with evidence and metrics.
- Commercial & Client Savvy: Experience in client-facing consulting or pre-sales environments, with comfort operating at the intersection of technical execution, delivery management, and account growth.
- Communication: Exceptional verbal and written communication skills to convey complex technical paradigms to diverse stakeholders.

What’s in It for You? We believe in empowering our team to thrive, with benefits including:

- Holiday: 25 days plus bank holidays (obviously!)
- Health Perks: Private health insurance (Vitality Health) and Smart Health Services
- Fitness & Wellbeing: 50% gym membership discounts (Nuffield Health, Virgin Active, Pure Gym).
- Hybrid Model: A WFH allowance to keep you comfortable.
- Learning & Growth: Access to platforms like Udemy to fuel your curiosity.
- Pension: (Auto-enrollment after probation period. 3% employer contributions raising 1% per year of service to a max of 10%)
- Life Insurance: (3 x your base salary!)
- Income Protection: (up to 75% of base salary, up to 2 years)
- Cycle to Work Scheme
- Tech Scheme

Why Datatonic? Join us to work alongside AI enthusiasts and data experts who are shaping tomorrow. At Datatonic, innovation isn’t just encouraged - it’s embedded in everything we do. If you’re ready to inspire change and deliver value at the forefront of data and AI, we’d love to hear from you!

Are you ready to make an impact? Apply now and take your career to the next level.

## About Datatonic

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Datatonic is the leading cloud data and AI consultancy that helps ambitious businesses drive impact through cutting-edge data, analytics, and generative AI technologies.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Bootstrapped/Organically Grown)
- **Headquarters**: London, United Kingdom
- **Founded**: 2013
- **Founders**: Louis Decuypere (Founder + Chairman of the Board)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Cloud Data & AI Consulting / Professional Services
- **Target Customers**: Enterprise and mid-market businesses across industries, primarily those using or migrating to Google Cloud
- **Mission/Purpose**: To sustain a position at the leading edge of data technology by stimulating a culture of constant innovation and delivering service with spectacular agility and accuracy.

## Products & Services
- **Cloud Data Migration**: Consulting and execution to move enterprise data workloads to Google Cloud.
- **Generative AI**: Development and deployment of custom GenAI solutions, leveraging Google Cloud's AI/ML ecosystem.
- **Marketing Analytics**: Advanced analytics solutions to drive marketing performance and ROI.
- **Data Engineering & Architecture**: Design and implementation of scalable, modern data platforms.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available (Private company).
- **Key Metric**: 197 total employees (as of latest data), with 24 open vacancies.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Datatonic is a 12x Google Cloud Partner of the Year Award winner, including being named Google Cloud's 2026 Country – UK/IE and Training, EMEA Partner of the Year.
- **Growth Signals**: The company has expanded from a single office to multiple locations across Europe and North America (London, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Nyon, Munich, Zagreb, Toronto), indicating strong international growth. They are actively hiring across multiple technical and commercial roles.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep Google Cloud Specialization**: As a 12x Google Cloud Partner of the Year, they have unmatched expertise and credibility within the Google Cloud ecosystem.
- **End-to-End Capability**: They cover the full lifecycle from cloud migration to advanced AI, offering a single partner for complex data transformations.
- **Culture of Innovation**: Their stated commitment to "constant innovation" and "spectacular agility" differentiates them from larger, slower consultancies.
- **Greentonic Initiative**: A dedicated sustainability and climate tech innovation arm, which is a unique differentiator for attracting talent and clients focused on ESG.

## Strategic Focus
- **Geographic Expansion**: Continued growth into new markets, with recent offices in Canada and continental Europe.
- **AI Leadership**: Doubling down on Generative AI as a core service offering, moving beyond traditional data analytics.
- **Talent Acquisition**: Aggressively hiring for senior technical roles (Lead ML Engineer, Principal Data Architect) to scale their delivery capacity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Emphasizes transparency, equity, respect, and belonging. Core values include "Make an Impact," "Cultivate Excellence," and "Power of Us."
- **Work Policy**: Flexible hybrid model (2-3 days per week in the office encouraged), with remote options available for some roles. Technical roles typically work from the office or home, not at client sites.
- **Benefits**: Private healthcare including mental health support and counselling, life insurance, and income protection policies.
- **Engineering Culture**: Projects are varied and typically last 3-6 months, offering exposure to different industries and challenges. They explicitly welcome applicants without prior Google Cloud experience if they have other cloud backgrounds.
- **Visa Sponsorship**: Offered for candidates willing to relocate to the UK. Not currently offered for other locations.
- **Hiring Process**: Typically 2-3 weeks from screening to offer. Feedback provided within 2-3 working days post-interview.

## Sources
1. [datatonic.com](https://datatonic.com/)
2. [datatonic.com - About](https://datatonic.com/about/)
3. [datatonic.com - Careers](https://datatonic.com/careers/)
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/datatonic)

## Other roles at Datatonic

- [Chief Solution Architect (Pre-sales, AI + Data Transformation)](https://feeny.ai/job/chief-solution-architect-pre-sales-ai-data-transformation-datatonic-canada-0b29hzerx2xh) — Canada
- [Principal Data Architect](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-data-architect-datatonic-london-f4jja0d05afq) — London, United Kingdom
- [Head of Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-platform-datatonic-canada-22x8f12w1594) — Canada
- [Senior Account Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-account-manager-datatonic-london-7ecce64esygj) — London, United Kingdom
- [Senior Delivery Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-delivery-lead-datatonic-london-byvwg31arf26) — London, United Kingdom
- [Head of Delivery Management](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-delivery-management-datatonic-london-yx9cfv7hnfre) — London, United Kingdom
- [Senior Data Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-data-engineer-datatonic-stockholm-q4khjc7sfqmh) — Stockholm, Sweden
- [Delivery Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/delivery-lead-datatonic-london-szcva4byfdvb) — London, United Kingdom
- [Delivery Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/delivery-lead-datatonic-canada-f5fgebe28xkt) — Canada
- [Partner Operations Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/partner-operations-coordinator-datatonic-london-kw0h49cjzry4) — London, United Kingdom