Technical Director - Defence

About Faculty

At Faculty, we transform organisational performance through safe, impactful and human-centric AI.

With a decade of experience, we provide over 300 global customers with software, bespoke AI consultancy, and Fellows from our award winning Fellowship programme.

Our expert team brings together leaders from across government, academia and global tech giants to solve the biggest challenges in applied AI.

Should you join us, you’ll have the chance to work with, and learn from, some of the brilliant minds who are bringing Frontier AI to the frontlines of the world.

About the role

Our Technical Directors play a vital role in shaping the overall technical strategy for their business unit alongside assembling and managing the highly skilled team to deliver innovative solutions for our customers.

In this case, we are looking for some to lead our Defence Business Unit. 

Please note that due to the nature of our current project requirements, applicants must either hold or be eligible to hold valid a certain level of clearance, preferably Developed Vetting (DV). Faculty will cover in full any costs associated with this process.

What you’ll be doing

As part of your day-to-day job, you can expect your key responsibilities to include:


Technical Delivery 

• Providing oversight of highly complex technical work, supporting and steering delivery teams when needed
• Identifying products, tools and processes to improve/enhance our ability to deliver quality
• Advising on matters of solution architecture, advanced modelling and engineering by bringing your own extensive technical background of developing both infrastructure and modelling software in resource-constrained settings 

Leadership 

• Building a team focused on best-in-class technical excellence and delivery by setting standards, defining ways of working and championing best practice 
• Overseeing the professional development and learning for technologists in the team 
• Co-owning the overall strategy for the Defence Unit incl. designing team structure, managing budgets, coordinating staffing and recruitment and managing performance 
  

Business Development 

• Identifying new technical markets to pursue/ technologies to build and equally, potential customer and partners opportunities within those markets
• Working with Business Directors, and the commercial team to land and expand market opportunities
• Delivering as the technical authority in meetings with senior client stakeholders

Who we’re looking for

To be successful in this role, you’ll have the unique ability to balance commercial, technical and strategic needs across multiple large-scale projects at a time, specifically in the Defence & National Security sectors.


We’ll need someone who is highly motivated to work within Defence and has a passion for delivering solutions to some of the world's most interesting problems through the delivery of safe, impactful and human-led AI.


In particular you’ll:

• Be an established technology leader with a track record of leading both the strategy and the delivery of projects in the AI / Machine Learning space
• Have the ability to communicate complex, technical information to internal and external stakeholders
• Ideally have experience in the Defence/National Security sector in particular within resource-constrained settings e.g. denied environments, edge and on-device 
• Come from a hands-on background with real-world deployment experience of machine learning or AI applications in production and architecting hardware/software systems
• Show strong commercial aptitude, with the ability to maximise commercial, technical and strategic needs during end-to-end scoping of a project.
• Align with Faculty’s ethical approach to working in the Defence and National Security sector. 

Beyond all of this, your attitude and behaviour are just as important as your skill and experience. We look for individuals who are empirical, support our principals, foster our culture and want to deliver for our organisation.

What we can offer you:

The Faculty team is diverse and distinctive, and we all come from different personal, professional and organisational backgrounds. We all have one thing in common: we are driven by a deep intellectual curiosity that powers us forward each day.

Faculty is the professional challenge of a lifetime. You’ll be surrounded by an impressive group of brilliant minds working to achieve our collective goals.

Our consultants, product developers, business development specialists, operations professionals and more all bring something unique to Faculty, and you’ll learn something new from everyone you meet.