Head of AI

Your Mission

Reporting directly to the CTO, you will define and own STARK's AI strategy, across the product, across internal tooling, and across the entire technical organisation. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with Chief Engineers and Engineering Leads, setting a direction they can execute against. On the product side, you'll push the boundaries of what's possible in sensing, autonomy, and robotics for defence. On the internal side, you'll systematically drive AI-powered productivity across every function at STARK. And beyond the company, you'll be our most visible and credible AI voice; the signal that serious AI talent picks up when deciding where to build next. 

Responsibilities

• Define and own STARK's AI strategy across product and internal domains, setting a direction that Technical Leads can execute against

• Lead AI stack decisions, model selection, frameworks, MLOps infrastructure, evaluation, and tooling, in partnership with the CTO and Technical Leads, with final technical accountability sitting with you

• Act as connective tissue across teams: identify and resolve cross-team AI dependencies, shared infrastructure gaps, and redundant workstreams that individual leads cannot see from inside their own domain

• Drive internal AI adoption across STARK, developer productivity tooling, agent and automation infrastructure, and responsible-use frameworks across engineering and operations

• Provide technical oversight and challenge across all AI workstreams, asking hard questions on methodology, adversarial robustness, distribution shift, and performance under real operational conditions, without taking over delivery

• Monitor the academic and commercial AI landscape and translate relevant advances into concrete strategic inputs for the CTO and programme leadership

• Keep AI strategy grounded in operational reality by partnering with programme and product leadership so that what we build maps to real mission requirements, not research for its own sake

• Raise the AI bar at STARK: contribute to senior technical hiring, define the AI engineering standard, and build STARK's standing in the European defence-AI community

• Represent STARK externally, speak at defence, robotics, and AI venues, publish or present where it serves the mission, and act as a credible signal of the company's technical ambition

What success looks like in the first 12 months:

• A single, written, widely-understood AI strategy that Chief Engineers and Technical Leads actively use to make decisions

• Internal AI tooling in production use, measurably changing how engineering and operations work day-to-day, not as a pilot

• At least one product-side AI capability moved meaningfully forward on your direction

• STARK visibly more attractive to senior AI talent than when you joined, with at least one strong hire personally pulled into the pipeline

Required Skills

Nice-To-Have

• An existing network within the European defence AI community

• Prior experience in a staff- or principal-level AI role inside a scaling deep-tech or defence company

• A public profile, talks, papers, or open-source work, that already signals technical credibility

• Comfort operating in a high-autonomy, low-overhead role: setting direction and shaping outcomes without a large dedicated team