Senior Director, Machine Learning Engineering (Dublin / Hybrid)
Location: Dublin, Ireland (Hybrid)
Contract Type: Permanent
Experience Level: Senior Leadership (10+ years)
Sector: FinTech / AI / Large Language Models
Salary: Competitive with benefits
About the Company
Our client is a leading FinTech innovator harnessing large language models (LLMs) and machine learning to transform financial decision-making, compliance automation, and customer intelligence. Their platform empowers global financial institutions to analyse data more intelligently, streamline reporting, and reduce operational risk - all through cutting-edge applied AI.
The company has established itself as a trusted technology partner across Europe and North America, combining deep financial domain expertise with advanced engineering. Headquartered in Dublin, this is a fast-growing, well-funded business entering its next phase of expansion.
The Opportunity
The company is seeking a Senior Director of ML Engineering to lead and scale their established ML engineering organisation. This is a pivotal role reporting to the CTO, responsible for driving the end-to-end strategy, execution, and delivery of machine learning and LLM-powered systems across multiple product lines.
You will guide a talented group of engineers and applied scientists working on model training, deployment, and optimisation for large-scale financial data environments. This is an opportunity to shape how generative AI and predictive models power financial insight and automation in a highly regulated industry.
Key Responsibilities
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Strategic Leadership: Define and execute the long-term ML and AI engineering strategy, aligning with company goals and product vision.
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Team Development: Lead and mentor an established team of ML Engineers, Applied Scientists, and MLOps specialists, fostering technical excellence and continuous learning.
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Technical Direction: Oversee the design, training, deployment, and monitoring of LLM and ML models in production at scale.
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Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Product, Data Science, and Platform Engineering to translate research into production-grade solutions.
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Operational Excellence: Establish best practices in model governance, experimentation, and reproducibility, ensuring security, compliance, and performance.
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Innovation and Impact: Stay at the forefront of advancements in LLMs, vector search, and multimodal learning — evaluating their potential to enhance financial insight and automation.
About You
You are a strategic technical leader who thrives at the intersection of AI innovation, financial technology, and scalable engineering. You balance hands-on technical understanding with the ability to inspire teams and influence senior stakeholders.
Required Experience
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10+ years in software or AI/ML/data engineering, including 5+ years in leadership roles.
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Proven experience managing large, cross-functional engineering teams (15+ engineers).
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Deep technical understanding of machine learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow) and MLOps practices.
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Demonstrated experience deploying and optimising large language models or generative AI systems in production environments.
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Strong understanding of data pipelines, feature engineering, and distributed systems.
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Experience working in or adjacent to financial services, regulatory technology, or other high-compliance domains.
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Excellent communication skills and ability to influence at C-level and board level.
Desirable Experience
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PhD or MSc in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
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Experience scaling ML infrastructure on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
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Knowledge of financial risk modelling, NLP for finance, or generative compliance tools.
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Familiarity with data privacy, explainability, and model fairness frameworks.
Why Join
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Join a profitable, innovation-driven FinTech at the forefront of applied AI.
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Lead a high-performing ML organisation shaping how LLMs transform finance.
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Work with exceptional peers across engineering, product, and research.
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Competitive salary and benefits package.
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Hybrid working from a central Dublin HQ.
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