At Brookwood, we’ve been at the heart of the AI talent market long enough to recognise when a real shift is happening and 2025 is one of those moments.
Organisations aren’t just looking for model builders; they’re chasing visionary leaders who can turn deep technical expertise into scalable, production-ready AI products that generate measurable business impact.
The Senior Machine Learning Scientist role today goes far beyond coding models in isolation. It’s about:
- Translating broad business problems into targeted ML/AI challenges
- Designing innovative algorithms and approaches across NLP, computer vision, recommenders, optimisation—and knowing how to combine them
- Running proof-of-concepts to prove value quickly, then scaling strategically to millions of users
- Building production-grade pipelines—batch, streaming, low-latency, and scalable
- Thinking platform-first, creating reusable AI systems that deliver across multiple business domains
- Coaching teams and communicating complexity in ways that influence product strategy
The Market Dynamics in 2025
- 89% increase in AI/ML job postings this year alone
- The ML engineering market is now worth $113B, with projections to quadruple by 2030
- Employers are relaxing degree requirements and focusing on specific high-value AI skills, which command a 23%+ wage premium
- Tech giants are aggressively recruiting—Meta offering $100M+ packages to lure “AI superathletes,” Apple losing senior AI talent to OpenAI, Cohere, and Meta, and Microsoft tapping DeepMind for its next wave of AI leaders
Our Strategic Take
We’ve helped senior candidates navigate this market, and the best opportunities share three things:
- Influence from the start — You’re involved in setting AI strategy, not just executing it.
- Platform thinking over point solutions — The work you do solves problems for the whole business, not just a single team.
- Balanced investment — The best companies give you the people, tools, and autonomy to prototype and deploy without unnecessary blockers.
The next generation of AI products will decide market leaders in almost every industry.
As a senior ML scientist, this is your chance to:
- Set the vision for AI in a high-impact product domain
- Tackle cross-disciplinary challenges that push the boundaries of what’s possible
- Create systems with outsized commercial, operational, and customer impact
If you are looking to hire the best in ML talent or you are looking for your next strategic move please contact the team on info@brookwoodrec.com
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