For senior, leadership, and mission-critical AI roles where quality, judgement, and delivery matter more than speed alone.
Our retained search solution is designed for organisations hiring mission-critical AI & Data talent. Roles where mis-hires, delays, or weak leadership create material business risk.
Unlike contingency recruitment, retained search prioritises:
Senior or specialist AI hires directly impact delivery, morale, and long-term capability.
Accessing credible LLM, MLOps, platform, or AI leadership talent requires proactive search — not job ads.
AI roles frequently sit at the intersection of technology, product, and transformation.
Hiring delays stall product launches, transformation timelines, and client commitments.
Generic recruitment approaches fail to screen for real-world AI delivery experience.
Deep technical screening, stakeholder alignment, and structured assessment, fast, without sacrificing depth.
First access to high-quality, passive AI talent before they reach the open market.
We align expectations across leadership and benchmark realistically against live market data.
Your search is prioritised and structured by a dedicated team of specialist consultants.
Bespoke candidate and role packs articulating the technical challenge and opportunity.
Hires that stay longer, scale teams effectively, and increase organisational AI maturity.
We work closely with your leadership team to understand the full context of the hire. AI strategy, delivery priorities, technical environment, culture, and growth trajectory. The goal is absolute clarity on what success looks like.
Using insight from discovery and live market data, we design a role-specific hiring strategy: refining scope, defining interview stages, creating an assessment framework, and advising on market-aligned compensation.
We create a dedicated candidate narrative articulating the technical challenge, impact, and your ambition. Packaged into bespoke materials that strengthen your employer brand and engage passive talent.
Full headhunting-led search with direct outreach to passive candidates, tailored messaging grounded in technical credibility, and careful qualification against agreed success criteria.
Regular check-ins to ensure transparency and momentum: structured progress updates, honest feedback, ongoing calibration, plus support through offer strategy, closing, and onboarding.
We value expertise and relationships over traditional agency sales tactics, focusing on long-term AI maturity.
Find out more about us→We understand modern AI systems. From LLM pipelines and MLOps to industrial ML and edge deployment, we screen for real capability, not keywords.
We align talent delivery to business outcomes, faster product velocity, reduced project risk, and sustainable AI capability.
Our work is underpinned by ongoing insight into AI hiring trends, compensation data, and evolving skill requirements across Europe.
Retained search, permanent hiring, and contract/freelance, designed around how AI teams actually scale.
“Oxygen Digital understands the nuance of production AI better than any partner we’ve worked with. They don’t just match keywords, they find engineers who can actually ship.”
“Same-week shortlist of three senior MLOps engineers, all relevant. We hired two. Cleanest recruitment process we’ve run in years.”
“They took the time to understand our roadmap before sending a single CV. That’s rare and it shows in the quality of people we’ve placed.”
Reach out today to set up a free 30-minute call. Whether you’re hiring your first ML engineer or scaling a global AI team, we’re here to discuss your goals.
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