About the role
Location: In person, Central London, 4–5 days in office
Type: Full-Time
NB: We are able to sponsor visas
Arva AI is revolutionising financial crime intelligence with our cutting-edge AI Agents. By automating manual human review tasks, we enhance operational efficiency and help financial institutions handle AML reviews, while cutting operational costs by 85%.
As Head of Research, you will lead the research function behind our AI Agent platform: the in-house models, agentic systems and evaluation infrastructure that power everything from document fraud detection to web-scale due diligence. At Arva, model quality is the product. You'll set the research agenda, build and lead the team that delivers it, and stay hands-on: training, fine-tuning and rigorously evaluating systems that must be faster, more thorough and more accurate than human reviewers in live, regulated workflows.
About the Role
As Head of Research, you will:
- Own Arva's AI research strategy, deciding where we build in-house capability, where we adapt frontier models, and which bets compound into a durable technical edge.
- Build and lead the research team, setting the technical bar and the practices that get research into production quickly and safely.
- Own model quality as a company-level outcome, from evaluation methodology and benchmarks through to the accuracy, explainability, latency and reliability of what runs in front of customers and regulators.
What You'll Do
Research Strategy & Roadmap
- Define and own the research roadmap, grounded in customer workflows, regulatory realities and the frontier of what LLMs, agents and vision models can do.
- Make clear build-vs-adapt decisions: when to fine-tune or distil, when to train bespoke models, and when to lean on frontier APIs.
