VP – Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence

• You will be joining an exciting well-funded deep-tech startup in
• Zurich

. There’s flexibility across multiple European hubs but relocation to Zurich is strongly preferred.

We are searching for a visionary AI executive to head up our machine learning organization and architect the next generation of our intelligence stack.

As we have successfully established the necessary hardware foundations and customer traction, we now require a world-class leader to transform our technological potential into industry-leading AI systems.

Reporting to the C-suite, you will oversee our end-to-end AI strategy, spanning from developer tools and edge-optimized architectures to advanced multi-modal systems for on-premises deployment.

You will shape our technical roadmap through 2027 and beyond, serving as both a technical authority and the external face of our AI initiatives.

As a

VP your responsibilities will include

Executive Strategy & Thought Leadership

• Design and own the global AI strategy, ensuring seamless integration with our product vision, hardware roadmaps, and go-to-market priorities.
• Act as a prominent voice in the AI community, representing the organization at major conferences, with strategic partners, and in high-level client engagements.
• Partner with senior executive stakeholders to steer the long-term technological trajectory of the business.
• Convert evolving research trends—such as test-time reasoning, vision-language modeling, and small-model efficiency—into actionable platform strategies.

Organizational Leadership & Mentorship

• Build, lead, and mentor a top-tier ML organization encompassing research, deployment, and developer tooling.
• Cultivate a professional environment that balances high-level academic rigor with industrial engineering efficiency.
• Execute a hiring strategy that attracts elite researchers and senior engineers who excel at the nexus of intelligence and hardware.
• Establish clear career growth frameworks and mentorship pathways to retain high-caliber talent.

Technical Execution & Innovation

• Supervise the architecture of optimized model serving stacks, including LLMs, VLMs, CNNs, and Vision Transformers.
• Spearhead co-design initiatives, including quantization, pruning, and model compression, to maximize performance on our proprietary silicon.
• Direct the creation of robust quality assurance and evaluation pipelines for optimized models.
• Lead the design of multi-user serving frameworks and integrations with popular developer platforms (e. g., Py Torch, Hugging Face) to broaden our market footprint.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Align the AI roadmap with software and hardware team capabilities.
• Partner with business development and sales teams to secure strategic contracts, identify new revenue streams, and support fundraising efforts.
• As a

VP your skills will include

• Ph D in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or a strictly related field from a premier institution
• 10+ years in ML research or engineering, with at least 4–5 years in a senior leadership capacity (e. g., Director or VP) within an industrial setting

Technical Track Record

• Demonstrated history of scaling high-performance teams in deep-tech or high-growth product environments.
• Deep expertise in at least two focus areas, such as efficient inference, large-scale training, vision-language architectures, or data-centric AI.
• A strong history of bridging the gap between theoretical research and customer-facing deployment.
• Significant publication history or evidence of research leadership in top-tier venues (e. g., Neur IPS, CVPR, ICML, VLDB).

Preferred Skills

• Experience with the complexities of edge AI, including power budgets, latency constraints, and memory optimization.
• Familiarity with operating in a startup environment characterized by rapid prioritization.
• An established professional network within North American and European ML communities.
• Experience creating ML toolchains or platforms used by the open-source community or external developers.

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