Head of Engineering IP

Company Description

At S&W, we help our clients thrive by simplifying the complex, illuminating new paths, and shaping solutions that make a difference. As one of the UK's top 10 fastest-growing accountancy firms, we have been a trusted partner since 1881—helping businesses and individuals meet challenges and seize opportunities across generations.

Built on expertise and driven by ambition, we provide a comprehensive range of services, including tax and accountancy, advisory and assurance, corporate finance, and restructuring. We are defined by our purpose—to help navigate challenges, unlock potential, and achieve the extraordinary.

S&W acquired ClearViewIP in September 2025 to complement the existing advisory services that S&W currently offers its clients including corporate finance, valuations, transaction services and forensic services, along with business tax, audit, consulting and business outsourcing services.

The ClearViewIP team comprises experienced IP professionals, with decades of experience in managing, protecting and commercialising innovation and ensuring best practice IP approaches are deployed to help clients win in the market.

Job Description

We are transforming IP research workflows into an AI-first, scalable platform architecture. Our mission is to convert complex, knowledge-intensive IP workflows—prior art search, patent landscape analysis, FTO, competitive intelligence—into modular, explainable, enterprise-grade AI systems.

The Head of Engineering will lead AI-driven digital transformation across our IP research operations. This role will own the engineering vision, architecture, and execution of intelligent IP workflows—translating deep domain expertise into robust, scalable, production-ready systems & processes. We are seeking a senior engineering leader to architect and execute the transition from expert-centric workflows to scalable, AI-native platforms.

This role owns the engineering delivery of the next-generation IP intelligence systems—transforming prior art search, patent landscaping, Freedom-to-Operate (FTO), and technology benchmarking from manual, analyst-driven processes into robust, explainable, AI-first architectures.

The role is based at our India office location.

Skills & Experience

• 12–15+ years in engineering leadership roles with platform ownership
• Proven experience building and scaling AI/NLP-powered platforms
• Background in IP analytics, legal tech, compliance, or other knowledge-intensive domains
• Deep familiarity with patent data structures, citation networks, and IPC/CPC classifications (strongly preferred)
• Expertise in LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, and RAG architectures for AI agents
• Experience designing evaluation and quality measurement frameworks for AI systems
• Strong background in semantic search and information retrieval
• Experience operationalizing AI systems in secure, enterprise environments
• Proven ability to design scalable systems handling large structured and unstructured datasets
• Ability to operate at both strategic and execution levels.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity during frontier AI adoption
• Product-oriented, outcome-driven approach to engineering leadership.
• Comfort balancing rapid innovation with robustness, governance, and explainability.
• Able to attract and mentor senior engineering talent
  
  

Key Competencies

• Customer focus –core to your role is to provide an excellent service to clients.
• Judgement – the firm relies on your judgement in the services supplied to clients. This has to be delivered as per the client's needs, technically excellent, commercial and on time.
• Technical expertise – strong technical leadership and maintaining your technical competence is critical to ensuring clients receive an excellent service.
• Networking – you are skilled at developing and growing relationships in the wider market and leveraging these to create opportunities for the business.
• Communication – you communicate both verbally and in writing in an engaging and purposeful manner.
• Leadership – you will help drive and lead a culture of continuous development, be able to identify future talent and act as mentor and sponsor.
  
  

Qualifications

• Educated to degree level or equivalent.
• A relevant qualification (such as qualifications in IP) is desirable, although not essential.