Head of AI Innovation

Faktion is an AI Product Studio as a Service. We envision, design and engineer enterprise-grade AI software solutions that transform how businesses operate. Spanning both business and industrial domains, our solutions range from intelligent knowledge assistants and AI-powered applications to advanced computer vision systems and agentic AI platforms that orchestrate and automate complex, end-to-end business and industrial processes.

We partner with organizations throughout the entire journey: identifying high-value opportunities, analyzing business challenges, shaping the right solutions, engineering and deploying scalable AI products, and continuously evolving them in production. By combining deep AI and software engineering expertise with a strong understanding of business needs, we turn cutting-edge AI innovation into robust, production-grade solutions that deliver measurable business impact.

As Head of AI Innovation you own the first half of that promise: the cutting edge, and the path from there to production. You lead our innovation domains across the company, you bring the frontier in, and you make sure it lands in proposals, in projects and in running solutions. Then you take what we learned back out, to clients and on stage.

At Faktion we have a strategic plan. It is called: doing things.

The Role

This is a lead role with both delivery and commercial aspects, for a proven leader with roots in AI and software engineering. You steer dedicated teams and innovation initiatives across the company, side by side with the people who build and ship our solutions.

• What it is: a seat in Faktion's leadership, steering dedicated teams and innovation initiatives laterally across the company. You own the innovation targets and budget, and you take an active part in winning strategic deals.

• Where you come from: AI and software engineering on systems that run in production is your foundation, whether you left hands-on engineering last year or many years ago. On top of it you have several years of proven leadership: you have led teams, owned budgets and targets, and worked with clients at senior level. Both are required.

• Where you go from here: you put everything you have built up to work at company scale. You work with our engineering and delivery teams every day, and you lead, shape and sell what they build.

• Looking for more engineering or no engineering background? If building full-time is what you love, our senior engineering roles are the better fit. If you want to bring AI to clients from a business background, see our AI Solutions Consultant role.

• You have transversal ownership of AI innovation at Faktion: its activities, its targets and its budget. Innovation here is always applied. It is organised in domains, each led by one of our lead engineers, and each domain runs innovation projects with people from our AI, software, delivery and advisory teams. You steer those domains and projects across the company.

• The role cuts across everything Faktion does: sales and proposal design, solution design and engineering, delivery, advisory, and how we show up in the market. Wherever new technology decides the outcome, you are involved and you set the bar.

• This is a technology role with direct customer impact. You are one of our technical faces in the market, and you take an active, shaping part in sales. You do not wait to be called in. You are in strategic deals from the first conversation to the signature, and you open conversations yourself wherever our innovation gives a client a reason to talk.

• In those deals you validate, sharpen and deepen the solution in complex client environments. You are the technical authority and trusted advisor for senior decision makers. You raise the quality, clarity and credibility of every proposal, you speed up the decision, and you keep a tight feedback loop between sales, engineering and delivery so the next proposal is better than the last.

• One ability matters above all others: positioning innovative technology in a client conversation so that it wins trust, removes doubt and becomes the deciding factor in closing the deal.

• You cultivate Faktion's thought leadership, and you do it by example. You publish, speak and show your own work, and you coach colleagues to do the same, so that what we learn in projects becomes a point of view the market knows us for.

• Leading by example is how you lead everything else too. You hold yourself to the standard you ask of others: you are in the work, you build, and you finish what you start.

The how

• Agentic SDLC: how we and our clients build software with agents, from requirements to operations.

• Evaluation-driven development: making AI systems measurable, so quality is proven and guaranteed before and after go-live. Productise workflows to involve human experts and evaluation agents as from the early build stages

• …

The what

• Agent orchestration: multi-agent architectures, tool use and long-running agents that hold up in enterprise systems.

• Context and knowledge: context engineering, knowledge assistants, process & enterprise brains.

• Voice and multimodal AI: voice agents, document and vision understanding.

• Benchmarking: new frameworks, new models, small and open models, routing and cost, and our own benchmarks.

• AgentOps and reliability at scale: observability, guardrails, security and compliance of agents in production.

• …

The portfolio is yours to shape. Domains start, merge and stop as the technology and the market move.

You report to the CEO and are part of Faktion’s leadership: next to the heads of AI, Delivery, Sales, Advisory.

What You Will Do

• Direction. You own a clear view on where AI and software engineering are going, and you turn it into choices: which bets we make, which experiments we run, and what we stop. You set the innovation roadmap together with the lead engineers.

• Outside in. You track new models, architectures, tools and engineering practices, and you bring them into Faktion through research, experiments and the wider AI ecosystem. You own our technical vendor partnerships and our subsidised research and development projects.

• Applied and industrialised. Every innovation project ends in something the teams use: a method, an accelerator, a reference architecture or a standard. You co-own those standards with the engineering teams, and you see them through to client projects that run in production.

• Winning with innovation. You are active in strategic sales from the first conversation to the signature. You shape the solution design and the proposal, you act as technical authority for senior decision makers, and you position new technology in a way that wins trust and removes doubt.

• Valorisation. You turn what we have proven into technical propositions with a market fit, together with sales and advisory.

• In the work. You stay close to solution engineering on the projects where new technology carries the risk. When building the prototype yourself is the fastest way to know, you build it.

• Inside out. You accelerate Faktion’s thought leadership: talks, publications, benchmarks and community. You are one of our faces on stage, and you help others get there.

• Culture. You cultivate curiosity, ownership and continuous learning, and you keep a tight feedback loop between sales, engineering and delivery.

What Success Looks Like

• Adoption: the share of client projects that use what the innovation domains produce.

• Propositions: new technical propositions brought to market.

• Deals: deals won where innovation made the difference.

• Visibility: talks, publications and the inbound interest they bring.