Group Manager, Detectors (Zürich)
Lakera
Zürich, Switzerland
Location
Zürich
Employment Type
Full time
Location Type
Hybrid
Department
ML
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 Group Manager with deep expertise in 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 several work streams and tech leads, work closely with highly skilled ML engineers and researchers, and shape the evolution of Lakera’s AI security defenses as the company scales.
Mission
Provide the best, fastest, and broadest threat detection to secure every GenAI and agentic AI application.
What You Will Do
Own the technical vision, roadmap, and execution for Lakera's detector and defense models.
Lead and grow the Detectors Group (~12 engineers today), recruiting top ML and software engineering talent and developing senior ICs and tech leads with the scope to build out a management layer as the organization scales.
Partner closely with Product, Research, GTM, and other Engineering teams, acting as a key technical counterpart to Product in shaping the detection roadmap and translating customer needs into engineering priorities.
Drive architectural and modeling decisions across production defense systems, ensuring high standards of quality, reliability, latency, and scalability.
Establish technical and operational processes for experimentation, evaluation, deployment, and iteration.
Design the organization for rapid growth without sacrificing execution velocity.
What Success Looks Like
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.
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.
Who You Are
A senior ML and engineering leader with 10+ 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.
Nice to Have
Experience building ML systems for security, trust and safety, or adversarial domains.
Background in deploying ML systems under strict latency, reliability, or adversarial constraints.