Director of Engineering , Detectors Group (Zürich)

📋 Description

• • As the Director of Engineering for the Detectors Group at Lakera.Ai, you will spearhead the development and evolution of our core machine learning systems, which form the bedrock of our AI security defenses. This is a pivotal leadership role within a rapidly growing company at the forefront of securing Generative AI and agentic AI applications. You will be instrumental in shaping the technical strategy, driving execution, and scaling our world-class ML organization to meet the escalating demands of the AI security landscape.
• • Your primary mission will be to ensure Lakera provides the best, fastest, and broadest threat detection capabilities available, safeguarding every GenAI and agentic AI application deployed globally. This involves owning the complete lifecycle of our detection and defense models, from conceptualization and research through to robust production deployment and continuous iteration.
• • You will lead the Detectors Group, a talented team currently comprising 15 individuals, with a clear mandate to scale it to approximately 30 highly skilled ML engineers and researchers within the next 12 months. This growth necessitates a strategic approach to talent acquisition, development, and organizational design, ensuring we attract and retain top-tier talent.
• • A key aspect of your role will be managing and developing engineering managers and senior individual contributors. You will foster a culture of high performance, technical excellence, and continuous learning, empowering your team to achieve ambitious goals and grow their leadership capacity.
• • Mentoring senior leaders and individual contributors is paramount. You will act as a technical guide and career advisor, raising the bar for technical rigor, innovation, and impactful contributions across the entire group. This includes fostering an environment where deep technical challenges are met with creative and effective solutions.
• • Collaboration is central to success. You will work closely with Product Management, Research, Go-to-Market (GTM) teams, and other Engineering departments to ensure our detection capabilities are tightly aligned with evolving customer needs, market trends, and the overarching company strategy. This cross-functional synergy is vital for delivering relevant and impactful security solutions.
• • You will drive critical architectural and modeling decisions for the systems that power our production defenses. This requires a deep understanding of ML system design, trade-offs, and the ability to make pragmatic choices that balance innovation with reliability and scalability.
• • Ensuring the highest standards of model quality, reliability, latency, and scalability in real-world customer deployments is a core responsibility. You will establish and refine robust technical and operational processes for experimentation, rigorous evaluation, seamless deployment, and rapid iteration, ensuring our defenses remain effective against sophisticated threats.
• • You will be responsible for designing and evolving the organizational structure and processes to support rapid growth while maintaining and even enhancing our execution velocity. This involves anticipating future needs and proactively building the infrastructure and workflows to support them.
• • Success in this role will be measured by Lakera's detection systems consistently leading the market in coverage, accuracy, and speed. We expect the Detectors Group to scale smoothly, maintaining exceptional technical quality and high team morale throughout the process. Managers and senior engineers should feel empowered, effective, and actively growing into larger scopes of responsibility. Technical decisions should reflect a balance between deep scientific rigor, pragmatic implementation, and a clear focus on customer impact. Ultimately, the organization must be capable of moving with speed and agility without ever sacrificing correctness, safety, or reliability in our AI security solutions.
• • This is an opportunity to make a significant impact on the future of AI security, leading a critical group within a company that is defining the security layer for the next generation of AI. You will be at the intersection of cutting-edge ML, critical security challenges, and organizational leadership, solving complex problems with a talented and passionate team.