Applied ML Technical Lead, Defence

Job description

Job title: Applied ML Technical Lead, Defence Location: London; full in-office working as default Start date: ASAP Reports to: CEO Compensation: Salary and Equity options available for discussion Clearance: Must be eligible to hold UK Security Vetting Clearance SC or above (no prior clearance required) Application Deadline: 08/11/26 at 23:59 UK Time ___________________________________________________________________________ Help put frontier AI to work in Defence Cosine is a UK AI lab building models, applications and training infrastructure for mission-critical organisations. We build coding agents that work across real software systems, specialised Lumen models, AI-native security products and the infrastructure needed to deploy advanced AI in demanding environments. Our customers include some of the world's largest enterprises, including organisations operating behind strict security, regulatory and technical constraints. We're also training Lumen Sovereign, the first frontier large language model trained in the UK, with the support of the UK Government. We're now looking for an Applied ML Technical Lead to help develop and deploy advanced AI capabilities for organisations operating in UK Defence and national security. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will work across machine learning development, deployment and customer-facing technical delivery. You may spend part of your time training and evaluating models on complex sensor data, and part of your time working with Defence stakeholders to understand operational needs, shape priorities and guide delivery. You will not be expected to act as a traditional project manager. Instead, you will own the technical direction and day-to-day progress of applied ML work, coordinating the people and decisions needed to turn promising research into useful operational capability. ___________________________________________________________________________ What you'll do Build ML capabilities for real Defence problems Design, build, train and evaluate machine learning models for challenging applied Defence and national security use cases. Work on problems involving complex sensor data, signal processing, pattern recognition, classification and multimodal intelligence. Develop and improve model architectures, training pipelines, evaluation frameworks and inference systems. Work with real-world and synthet…