Head of Tooling AI Research

Paul Ekman Group (PEG) / DeepL

London, England, United Kingdom

Your Responsibilities

• Define and drive the strategic vision and technical roadmap for the Research Tooling Unit, ensuring alignment with the fast‑evolving needs of our AI research teams.
• Lead, mentor, and develop the managers of our four distinct tooling teams, empowering them to build high‑performing, happy, and collaborative teams.
• Provide clear career development pathways, coaching, and support for your team leads.
• Act as the primary representative for Tooling within the Research department, managing expectations, defining scope, and communicating priorities to senior stakeholders (including the Chief Scientist).
• Create and implement robust planning structures that align tooling initiatives with broader research priorities and identify horizontal synergies across the department.
• Champion the adoption of tooling deliverables, clearly demonstrating their value and impact on research productivity and innovation.
• Balance the need for rapid delivery in a research context with the long‑term reliability and sustainability of engineering solutions.
• Lead hiring efforts to scale the teams, particularly in areas supporting frontier model training.

Qualities we look for

• Proven experience in a senior engineering leadership role (e.g., Head of, Senior Engineering Manager) within a fast‑paced, research‑heavy organisation.
• A strong technical background as an individual contributor (e.g., Software Engineer, Data Engineer) earlier in your career.
• Demonstrable experience managing multiple "platform" or "tooling" teams that serve internal technical customers (like researchers or other engineers).
• A successful track record of managing other managers and team leads, with a genuine focus on their career development and growth.
• Exceptional stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to create alignment, manage expectations, and navigate a complex, multi‑stakeholder environment.
• Strong strategic and planning skills, capable of translating ambiguous, high‑level visions into concrete technical roadmaps.
• An empathetic, people‑first leadership style, focused on building trust, coaching reports, and fostering a positive team culture.
• High adaptability and pragmatism, with the ability to make decisive choices in an uncertain, rapidly evolving environment (both at DeepL and in the wider AI field).

What we offer

• Diverse and internationally distributed team: joining our team means becoming part of a large, global community with people of more than 90 nationalities.
• Open communication, regular feedback: as a language‑focused company, we value the importance of clear, honest communication.
• Hybrid work, flexible hours: we offer a hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week.
• Virtual Shares – an ownership mindset in every role.
• Regular in‑person team events: we bond over vibrant events, from local team and business unit gatherings to company‑wide events.
• Monthly full‑day hacking sessions: every month we have Hack Fridays.
• 30 days of annual leave: we value your peace of mind.
• Competitive benefits: a tailor‑made benefits package reflecting the diversity of our team.

We are an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at DeepL for who you are.