United Kingdom

Recruitment agency for artificial intelligence talent.

We place machine learning engineers, research scientists, and applied AI leaders into British companies — from seed-stage labs in King's Cross to FTSE 100 transformation programmes. One practice, one discipline.

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01 — Roles

Nine specialities. Every mandate inside the discipline.

We don't dabble in data analyst roles or broader engineering searches. Every placement sits squarely in the AI stack.

Research Scientists

PhD-calibre researchers for frontier labs, industry research groups, and post-training teams. We know the difference between a NeurIPS reviewer and a NeurIPS spotlight author.

£110,000 – £300,000

Machine Learning Engineers

Engineers who turn research into systems that scale. Strong on distributed training, inference optimisation, and the data plumbing that actually ships.

£85,000 – £220,000

Applied Scientists

Hybrid researcher-engineers who own a problem end-to-end. Ideal for product companies building on LLMs, recommendations, forecasting, or computer vision in production.

£95,000 – £180,000

MLOps & Platform

Engineers who build the substrate — training clusters, feature stores, evaluation harnesses, and the CI that catches a silent regression before your users do.

£90,000 – £200,000

AI Product Managers

PMs fluent in evaluation, guardrails, and the peculiar lifecycle of a model that keeps improving after launch. Rare in the UK and commensurately well paid.

£95,000 – £210,000

AI Safety & Alignment

For frontier labs, policy institutes, and regulated enterprises: researchers working on interpretability, evaluations, red-teaming, and responsible deployment.

£100,000 – £300,000

Computer Vision & Perception

For autonomy, medical imaging, geospatial, and industrial inspection. A dedicated network across Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and UCL alumni.

£90,000 – £220,000

NLP & LLM Engineers

Specialists in fine-tuning, retrieval, agents, and post-training. The market is loud here — we filter the prompt engineers from the people who actually shift benchmarks.

£95,000 – £250,000

AI Leadership

Heads of AI, VPs of Machine Learning, Chief AI Officers. Hires that shape a strategy, not just execute one. Retained search with a longlist you can present to a board.

£180,000 – £500,000 + equity

02 — Method

A recruiter who can read the paper on your candidate's CV.

Technical literacy, not buzzword fluency

Our consultants come from the field — former research engineers, ML leads, and AI product managers. We can probe a candidate on transformer architecture, evaluation methodology, or production latency without Googling underneath the table.

A UK-first network, built deliberately

Three years deliberately building relationships across UK AI: DeepMind alumni, Cambridge research cohorts, the Imperial and Oxford ML societies, and the hundred-odd meaningful AI startups between Shoreditch and Bristol. Much of what we place has never touched the open market.

Built for post-Brexit reality

Global Talent Visa sponsorship, the Scale-up route, relocation from the EU, and the occasional US repatriation — we've handled every pattern British AI hiring now demands. Your shortlist reflects who can actually start.

Retained, not contingent

We run a small number of searches at a time. Fees are retained and staged against milestones. No database spam, no duplicate submissions, no placing the same candidate at your competitor next week.

Honest about the market

If your salary band is twenty per cent below what the role commands in London, we'll tell you before we start — not after four weeks of a cold search. If a candidate is a stretch, they come with a written note explaining the risk.

03 — Clients

Who we hire for.

Frontier labs

UK-based research labs and applied AI groups.

AI-native startups

Seed to Series C — London, Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh.

Enterprise AI teams

FTSE 100 and 250 — financial services, pharma, retail, media.

Government and public sector

AISI, GDS, NHS AI Lab, MOD-adjacent programmes.

Scale-ups going deep

Mature tech companies building their first AI function.

US firms opening UK

Establishing London research and engineering hubs.

04 — Proof

The work, in numbers.

42days

Median time from brief to signed offer across AI mandates.

91%

Placements still in seat at 24 months — across all AI roles since 2022.

6/10

Shortlisted candidates are passive — not searching, not on the job boards.

80+

AI roles closed across the UK since founding — no generalist placements, ever.

We were six months into a search for a Head of ML with two other firms and had interviewed no one we'd actually hire. AXICA took the brief on a Tuesday. Our shortlist arrived twenty-three days later — every candidate genuinely qualified. We hired the second one we spoke to.

Co-founder and CTO Series B fintech, London · search closed 2025

05 — FAQ

Frequently asked questions.

How is this different from a generalist tech recruiter?

A generalist recruiter can tell a PyTorch candidate from a TensorFlow one. We can tell you why a candidate who worked on RLHF at a frontier lab may not be the right fit for a retrieval-heavy enterprise product, and who would be. The filter we apply is substantive, not semantic.

Do you work on contract or interim roles?

Rarely, and only when the role is senior and the engagement is at least six months. We focus on permanent placements because the depth of vetting we do doesn't pay back on short-term fills.

What does a typical engagement look like?

A retained search of eight to twelve weeks. Calibration call, a written brief and scorecard agreed within a fortnight, longlist at week three, shortlist of two to five candidates at week five, offer signed by week ten on average.

What's your fee structure?

Retained: 30% of the first-year base salary, staged across engagement, shortlist, and placement. If we don't deliver a viable shortlist, the second and third instalments are not invoiced. Twelve-month replacement guarantee on every permanent placement.

Do you work with clients outside London?

Yes. We have active searches in Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, Manchester, and Bristol. AI talent in the UK concentrates around universities, and our network reflects that.

06 — Contact

Tell us about the AI role you need to fill.

Briefs submitted before Thursday evening typically receive a calibration call the following Monday.