Head of Tech and Engineering

“Project Atlantic”is a new B2B SaaS start up, currently pre-market fit and operating in “stealth” mode. While initially based inside Control Risks, the intent is to have “Project Atlantic”spun out and independent at a future point. You will join a small, lean, and highly dynamic environment, driven by a common aspiration to fundamentally reimagine two decades of compliance and commerce assumptions and best practice. Creativity, passion, drive, dynamism, intellect, flexibility, and contrarian thinking will be the fundamental qualities we ask in those joining us. Given the lean nature of the team, we are seeking people who are curious to get involved in all aspects of the venture to build a common and seamless product not hindered by silos.

“Project Atlantic” is an AI start-up concept that in 2025 will come to life. As Head of Tech & Engineering, you will be part of the founding team, responsible for painting colour into a black & white image of an AI-enabled future, architecting our vision, and spearhead the technical development, vision and innovation for a V1 product and beyond. Working closely with other founding team members and wider Control Risks colleagues, you will help define the “Project Atlantic” technology stack, develop the technology strategy, and will supervise all technical aspects of the Product and its development, ensuring innovation sits at the core of what we build. You will hire and lead a lean team of technical data scientists, AI specialists, and software developers, and ultimately ensure that the “Project Atlantic” product and ecosystem delivers a truly cutting-edge technology offering that redefines the governance and compliance sector, and is a delight to those customers that use it.

Requirements

What You'll Do:

Technology stack and technical architecture, strategy & innovation

• You will take ownership for the “Project Atlantic” technology stack and technical vision and architecture, and in doing so play a fundamental foundational role in the development and longer-term success of the product and ecosystem.
• Work closely with the Head of Product and other “Project Atlantic” members to bring our product roadmap/vision to life, and elegantly solve our customers’ unmet needs in a transformational and innovative way.
• Define a technology strategy that assesses the advantages of various technical and data opportunities, offers a clear technical vision that delineates the product application from the intelligence/foundational model and infrastructure layers, and puts deep innovation, including creative artificial intelligence use cases, at the core of our product and longer-term development roadmap.

• Determine the necessary digital tools, infrastructure and hardware required to deliver on our goals and ambitions.
• Build relationships with data and development teams at our data partners to optimise integration and ingestion of their data into our graph, and subsequent analytics and output creation.
• Oversee the design and implementation of a robust and highly scalable technical architecture, ensuring alignment with business requirements, security standards and industry best practices, while leveraging the most appropriate AI/Agentic/innovative approaches to building the platform, and automate wider business functions such as marketing, product testing, sales etc..
• Continually seek out new technology opportunities for us to ensure that “Project Atlantic” pushes the envelope in terms of data structures and scalability, automated disambiguated research, custom reporting and other relevant areas.
• Participate in thought leadership initiatives such as webinars, podcasts, presentations, and publications to enhance the “Project Atlantic” reputation and industry influence.

Build out data science, R&D, and wider software development team

• Create and propagate a culture of innovation, excellence, open mindedness, ownership and contrarian thinking across our software development, data science and R&D teams to deliver recurringly exceptional outputs.
• Build out and lead a lean high-skilled data science, machine learning and AI R&D team to determine and develop appropriate underlying graphing/vector/other data structures, analytics, GenAI model selection, RAG and fine tuning to build proprietary dataset and output necessary custom reporting.
• Build out and lead an AI-enabled lean & agile engineering and software development team to develop wider platform and ecosystem, ensuring clean, error free and healthy structured/well documented code, a future-proofed reusable core code library, optimal QA testing, excellent API integrations, security considerations, and interoperability with existing relevant Control Risks digital platforms etc.
• Create and manage the technology budget, optimising resource allocation and ensuring cost-effective solutions.
• Drive a culture of automation and artificial intelligence, ensuring every process across the business is evaluated with a view on what can be automated to enhance efficiency and innovation.

Technical governance and integration with wider Control Risks digital ecosystem

• Establish and maintain efficient and reliable technology operations, including systems infrastructure, network, data management and security protocols for high performance, uptime and data integrity.
• Examine existing Control Risk technology stack, architecture and data infrastructure/security, and determine what is relevant in the “Project Atlantic” use case, and work with broader Control Risks digital teams to optimize this.
• In coordination with the wider Control Risks digital team such as DTS (including Infosec), Tech Assurance and legal, develop and implement information security, disaster recovery and business continuity plans and strategies.
• In coordination with the wider Control Risks digital team such as DTS (including Infosec), Tech Assurance and legal, identify and mitigate technology-related risks, ensuring data privacy and security regulations compliance.

Who You Are:

Knowledge, experience and specialist skills

• Proven significant technical/engineering leadership experience (8+ years) with a focus on lean and agile, ideally inside a SaaS start-up environment.
• Evidence of working inside a pre-product market fit environment, and of being flexible, cross functional, with a demonstrated ability to drive product innovation and bring products to market successfully.
• Strong knowledge and experience in AI derived technologies, including but not limited to Generative AI, LLMs, Machine Learning, Agentic workflows, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Graph databases. Evidenceclarity about their application in our sector, and a deep understanding of their strengths and weaknesses and how to leverage maximum value and avoid associated pitfalls. AI interest and experience must materially pre-date ChatGPT (2022).
• Deep knowledge of data structures and science, and a clear view on how we might optimise these in “Project Atlantic”, along with a proven ability to hire and manage high skilled data scientists to achieve complex innovative outcomes.
• Advanced level (knowledge and experience) of programming languages and methodologies, and recent and demonstrable experience of leading a team of software developers.
• Strong background in distributed systems and marketplace architectures, coupled with hands-on experience.
• Excellent leadership and team management skills, with the ability to inspire and develop high-performing technology teams.
• Demonstrated success in managing IT infrastructure, IT budgets, software development and systems architecture.
• Extensive knowledge of software development methodologies, infrastructure management, and cybersecurity best practices.
• Experience driving digital transformation initiatives, leveraging cloud technologies, and implementing data-driven decision-making.
• Evidence of being problem/outcome rather than solution/output focused – we are trying to solve unserved problems, not just build products.
• A master’s degree in computer science, information technology or a related field.
• Familiarity with Agile and DevOps methodologies for software development/delivery.
• Fluent in English; outstanding communication, presentation, and leadership skills
• Strong written, presentation and verbal communication skills, with a high degree of attention to detail; communicates clearly and concisely using language appropriate to audience
• Comfortable operating in a start-up working environment, with the ability to build trusted internal relationships
• Is sensitive and responsive to individual and cultural differences, adjusting style to get the best from individuals
• Maintains high standards in dealing with people, is a role model and leads teams and individual performance in a consistent and professional manner.
• Ensures sound commercial awareness applied to all solutions, harnessing margin improvement

Benefits

• Control Risks offers a competitively positioned compensation and benefits package that is transparent and summarised in the full job offer.
• We operate a discretionary global bonus scheme that incentivises, and rewards individuals based on company and individual performance.
• Control Risks supports hybrid working arrangements, wherever possible, that emphasise the value of in-person time together - in the office and with our clients - while continuing to support flexible and remote working.
• As an equal opportunities employer, we encourage suitably qualified applicants from a wide range of backgrounds to apply and join us and are fully committed to equal treatment, free from discrimination, of all candidates throughout our recruitment process

Control Risks is committed to a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age or veteran status”

If you require any reasonable adjustments to be made in order to participate fully in the interview process, please let us know and we will be happy to accommodate your needs.