Head of Data & AI

Head of Data & AI

Location: London | Hybrid

Salary: Competitive + Equity

Company: VC-Backed AI-Native HealthTech Startup

The Opportunity

Pulse Group are partnering with an ambitious, VC-backed AI-native HealthTech startup that's developing innovative technology to transform healthcare.

Following significant investment and with ambitious growth plans, they're looking for a Head of Data & AI to lead their AI strategy, scale their data infrastructure and build a high-performing technical team.

This is a hands-on leadership opportunity for someone who thrives in startup environments, enjoys building from the ground up and has experience taking AI-powered products from concept into production.

Working closely with the founders and engineering leadership, you'll have genuine ownership over the technical direction, architecture and growth of the AI & Data function.

Key Responsibilities

• AI Strategy & Delivery: Own the AI and Data roadmap, developing scalable, commercially valuable AI-powered healthcare products.
• Hands-On Engineering: Lead the design and deployment of production-grade AI/ML solutions, including LLMs, Generative AI, RAG and agentic AI systems.
• Data Architecture: Design and scale modern data platforms, pipelines and infrastructure to support growing product demands.
• Team Growth & Leadership: Build, hire and scale high-performing AI, ML and Data Engineering teams, establishing strong engineering practices and a collaborative culture.
• Technical Ownership: Drive architectural decisions, technical standards, MLOps and production reliability.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Product, Engineering and senior leadership to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Governance & Security: Ensure appropriate standards for data privacy, security, compliance and responsible AI, particularly when handling sensitive healthcare data.

Key Skills & Experience

• Strong commercial experience delivering AI/ML products into production, ideally including LLMs, Generative AI, RAG or agentic AI.
• Proven experience building, hiring and scaling technical teams, ideally within a startup or high-growth scale-up.
• Strong hands-on engineering background in Python, SQL and modern data architectures.
• Experience designing scalable cloud infrastructure using AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Knowledge of modern AI frameworks and technologies such as PyTorch, Hugging Face, LangChain, vector databases and model APIs.
• Experience with data engineering platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, Spark or Airflow.
• Strong understanding of MLOps, model deployment, evaluation, monitoring and CI/CD.
• Experience making architectural decisions and owning technical delivery from concept through to production.
• Understanding of data governance, privacy and security, ideally within HealthTech or another regulated environment.
• A commercially minded, hands-on leadership style with the ability to balance strategy and delivery.

About You

You'll ideally come from an AI-native startup or scale-up, with experience building AI products and growing technical teams through periods of rapid expansion.

You might currently be a Head of AI, Head of Data, Head of Machine Learning, AI Engineering Manager or senior technical leader looking for greater ownership.

We're looking for someone who can operate strategically while remaining close to the technology, comfortable working directly with founders and equally passionate about building great products and great teams.

Why Join?

• Join a well-funded, high-growth AI-native HealthTech business.
• Own the AI and Data strategy, architecture and technical roadmap.
• Build and scale your own specialist engineering team.
• Work with cutting-edge AI technologies solving meaningful healthcare challenges.
• Collaborate directly with founders and influence key business decisions.
• Competitive salary, equity and significant long-term growth opportunities.

Interested?

If you're a hands-on AI & Data leader with experience building products and scaling engineering teams, we'd love to hear from you.

Apply directly or get in touch for a confidential conversation.