Head of AI

Head of AI LocationRemote (Europe)Employment TypeFull timeLocation TypeRemoteDepartmentEngineeringCompensation£180K – £250K • 0.2% – 0.5%Summary of the Role:Maze is building an AI-native vulnerability management platform. Our autonomous agents investigate, triage, and remediate security findings the way a senior analyst would, only faster and at scale. As Head of AI, you'll own the intelligence that makes those agents work: the AI research and implementation strategy for the whole company, plus the crown-jewel technical problem underneath it. Our investigation agents run multi-step, non-deterministic trajectories across a toolset of 180+ tools, tested against a ground-truth exploit lab we built for exactly this purpose. Knowing whether they're getting better, and making them better, is the most important technical problem at Maze. It's the heart of this role.This is a hands-on leadership role, not a management layer. You'll set AI direction as a member of the engineering leadership team reporting to the CTO. But you'll spend most of your time building: designing evaluation frameworks for non-deterministic agents, running fine-tuning and model-routing experiments against real data, prototyping new techniques and getting them into the product. You'll lead a small, strong AI team (3–4 engineers today) by setting the technical bar and doing the work alongside them, while working closely with our ML tech lead and the product teams building agents day to day. Your impact comes from what you ship, not the size of your org. We're not looking for someone to run a large team from two layers up. We're looking for someone who wants to define how generative AI transforms cybersecurity and keep their hands on the code.This role suits a deep LLM-era practitioner who has shipped agentic systems to production, can reason about transformer internals and fine-tuning from first principles, and moves fast. We're a three-product company with a lot of surface area, a well-funded Series A (Theory Ventures) behind us, and a Series B on the horizon. The AI foundation you set now becomes the moat we compete on for years — this is a foundational hire whose standards will shape Maze's AI trajectory well past this raise.Your Contributions to Our Journey:Own AI strategy and research direction: Set the technical roadmap for our AI capabilities. Stay ahead of the research curve to find, validate, and prioritise the techniques that differentiate Maze, and turn what's real into a concrete, sequenced roadmap while discarding the hype.Own agent quality and evaluation: Build and run the frameworks that tell us whether our investigation agents are improving. That means trajectory evaluation, ground-truth scoring against the exploit lab, and end-to-end benchmarks for non-deterministic, multi-step behaviour. This is the core problem of the role.Build the breakthroughs yourself: Prototype a new technique in days, get it into the product, and measure the impact. You'll spend most of your time hands-on in the codebase, acting as the technical product manager who guides it to production.Run fine-tuning and model experiments on real data: Own fine-tuning pipelines, context engineering, model migration, and cost/routing optimisation grounded in production data, not proofs of concept.Guide prioritisation across the AI team: New techniques, papers, and ideas surface constantly. You'll be the filter deciding which of them are actually worth a prototype this week, and which are noise - keeping the team focused on what moves the needle.Lead a small team by doing: Set technical direction for the AI engineers, raise the bar through pairing and review, hire as we scale, and stay close enough to the work to make the hard architectural calls yourself.Partner with the CTO and engineering leadership: Turn the AI roadmap into shipped capability, and make sure evaluation is wired into how the whole team builds.Get in front of customers: Occasional direct customer exposure, translating...