Head of AI

About the role

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.

What you'll do

• 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
• Monitor the academic and commercial AI landscape and translate relevant advances into concrete strategic inputs for the CTO and programme leadership
• Represent STARK externally, speak at defence, robotics, and AI venues, and act as a credible signal of the company's technical ambition

What you'll need

• Degree in machine learning, computer vision, robotics, or a closely related field, or demonstrably equivalent depth through industry research and an open publication or open-source record
• Proven experience setting AI technical strategy at a senior level, across multiple domains simultaneously, not within a single team or project
• Deep technical fluency in at least one of: perception and sensor fusion, autonomy and motion planning, SLAM/localisation, or multi-agent coordination (C2), with enough breadth to engage credibly across all of them
• Strong track record of influencing technical decisions without direct line authority, working through and alongside Technical Leads, not over them
• Experience in defence, aerospace, or another safety-critical domain where AI system failure carries real-world consequence; direct UAS or ground-robotics experience strongly preferred
• Fluent English; working German is a practical advantage in Berlin or Munich
• Eligibility for the required security clearance

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