Director of Engineering , Detectors Group (Zürich)

Lakera is building the security layer for the GenAI and agentic AI era. The Detectors Group owns the core machine learning systems that power Lakera’s defenses, delivering the fastest, broadest, and most reliable threat detection for GenAI and agentic AI applications.

We are looking for a Director of Machine Learning to lead the Detectors Group. This is a senior engineering leadership role for an experienced ML leader who can drive technical strategy, execution, and organizational scale. You will manage managers, work closely with highly skilled ML engineers and researchers, and shape the evolution of Lakera’s AI security defenses as the company scales.

Provide the best, fastest, and broadest threat detection to secure every GenAI and agentic AI application.

• Own the technical vision, roadmap, and execution for Lakera’s detector and defense models.

• Lead the Detectors Group, currently 15 people, and scale it to ~30 within the next 12 months.

• Manage and develop engineering managers and senior ICs, building a high-performing ML organization.

• Mentor senior leaders and ICs, raising the bar for technical excellence and impact across the group.

• Partner closely with Product, Research, GTM, and other Engineering teams to align detection capabilities with customer needs and company strategy.

• Drive architectural and modeling decisions across systems used in production defenses.

• Ensure high standards of model quality, reliability, latency, and scalability in real-world customer deployments.

• Establish strong technical and operational processes for experimentation, evaluation, deployment, and iteration.

• Design and evolve the organization to support rapid growth while maintaining execution velocity.

• Lakera’s detection systems consistently lead the market in coverage, accuracy, and speed.

• The Detectors Group scales smoothly while maintaining high technical quality and team morale.

• Managers and senior engineers are empowered, effective, and growing into larger scopes.

• Technical decisions balance deep rigor with pragmatism and customer impact.

• The organization can move fast without sacrificing correctness, safety, or reliability.

• A senior ML and engineering leader with 20+ years of experience across machine learning, applied AI, and software systems.

• Comfortable going deep technically, while also operating at the organizational and strategic level.

• Strong mentor who enjoys elevating people around you and building leadership capacity.

• Experienced managing managers and leading multi-layered teams.

• Humble, curious, and motivated by building the best solutions rather than defending ego or ideology.

• Energized by solving problems at the intersection of people, technology, and organization.

• Experienced in scaling teams and systems in high-growth environments.

• Experience building ML systems for security, trust and safety, or adversarial domains.

• Background in deploying ML systems under strict latency, reliability, or adversarial constraints.