London · Available globally

AI transformation, strategy & operations.

Turning frontier technology into measurable business outcomes — between strategy and delivery, building with AI hands-on.

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About

Operator across 0-to-1, scale, and frontier AI.

Oxford PPE and McKinsey-trained, with a decade across venture building, hyperscaling start-ups, post-IPO global operations and frontier AI.

Equally at home architecting operating models, leading enterprise AI delivery, and shipping the tools that make teams faster. A hands-on builder of agentic and GTM tooling — and a trusted partner to founders, C-suites and boards.

Deep international experience embedded across the US, Canada, Sweden, China, the UK, Germany and across MENA. Currently leading agentic-AI engagements at Invisible Technologies.

$1.38B
Lifetime order value underpinned at ECARX
$1.2M
Vendor consolidation savings
12 → 110
Team scaled at Lean Technologies
~94%
Report-cycle cut by Slack2Slides
Capabilities

What I do.

Four hire-me lanes. Most engagements blend two or more.

AI Transformation

From scoping to delivery: agentic systems, multi-agent orchestration, prompt & context design, evals, and AI tooling that actually ships.

LLMs & agentsMCPClaude · Cursor · Gemini

Strategy & Operations

Operating-model design, GTM, programme management, organisational design — turning ambiguous strategic intent into shipped operating systems.

Operating modelsGTMOrg design

Programme Delivery

Rescue, reset, ship. Distressed engagements, time-critical rollouts, FedRAMP, distributed FTE-plus-contract teams — landing programmes that have to land.

TurnaroundsFedRAMPFTE + contract

Forward-Deployed Delivery

Embedded engineering for enterprise clients, from frontier AI labs to public-sector compliance programmes. Helped define FDE as a hiring discipline at Invisible.

FDEEnterprise AIEmbedded
Experience

Where I've operated.

Click any role to expand.

Invisible Technologies
Engagement Manager & Project Lead, Agentic Systems · R&D Team
End-to-end enterprise AI platform · London
Aug 2025 – Present
+
  • Recruited by the Director of Platform and reporting to the Field CTO (Europe) in a founding leadership seat running delivery operations for a new R&D unit; scaled the forward-deployed team to 12 (a core of 6 plus contract resource), and helped transition it from non-revenue R&D onto revenue-generating client delivery while maintaining team cohesion.
  • Took over a critical, time-sensitive US-government (FedRAMP) programme of 35+ engineers at a Field CTO's request — joining with only 6 weeks remaining after scoping had consumed half the auditor-recommended 4-month timeline; introduced tech-lead ownership and rebuilt culture across a cross-country FTE-plus-contract team to deliver on time, cited by auditors as one of the best deployments they had seen in the framework.
  • Project-led Invisible's first RL-environments product end-to-end — from scoping and concepting to customer calls — selling to frontier AI labs, owning pricing and positioning, and bridging off-the-shelf data research with the RL-environment creation platform.
  • Worked across enterprise engagements spanning a global private equity fund, a FTSE 100 fintech and US public sector — partnering with commercial leadership to engage clients on cutting-edge R&D projects.
  • Helped define Forward-Deployed Engineering as a new hiring discipline at the firm — designing the R&D-engineer hiring bar and owning candidate data and process management to recruit 3 engineers in 3 months.
  • Drove internal partnerships to amplify the R&D team — aligning sales and product to its capabilities and backlog, surfacing new opportunities, and horizon-scanning emerging technologies for future business upside.
  • As Expert in Residence for non-engineering AI implementation, built and maintained an AI toolkit and plugin library for project and commercial leads — embedding best practice across teams, including an enterprise customer-health tool deployed across every account, championed to CEO, Field CTO and SVP/VP Operations.
  • Built "Slack2Slides" (Apps Script + Cowork), cutting customer/executive report creation from ~4 hours to 15 minutes (~94% faster).
ECARX
Director, EMEA Strategy & Growth → Head of Operations & Programs, EMEA
Nasdaq-listed automotive-computing & AI group · London (with secondments to Shanghai, Gothenburg, Stuttgart)
Mar 2023 – Aug 2025
+
  • Hand-picked into a 6-month-old London office, reporting to the COO (alongside the CFO & Chief People Officer), to build the European function and re-architect a 4-year-old, China-based post-IPO organisation into a globally-facing, OEM-ready operating model.
  • Underpinned the largest deal in company history outside its parent group — $1.38B in lifetime order value — by building the commercial analytics, dashboards and insight that supported the C-suite sales pursuit (context: $703m total 2025 revenue).
  • Hired 22 staff including 12 VP/SVP executives, building product and solutions leadership orgs, then drove their initial strategic initiatives and product launches.
  • Saved $1.2M by insourcing an underperforming RPO/BPO vendor and standing up an in-house talent function (hired 3 incl. a Head of Talent) to hit aggressive UK/Germany hiring targets.
  • Led a 4-analyst internal-consulting team driving process optimisation, infrastructure consolidation and shared-service transformation, and built four Centres of Excellence (workflow mapping, procurement, organisational design, COO special projects).
  • Seconded to Shanghai HQ for 9 months to translate Asian-market processes into European-compliant operating models; later drove an EMEA reorg — aligning the Sweden BU under the global team, 50% workforce reduction and union negotiation — while protecting delivery of a critical product release.
  • On the early ChatGPT-adoption team: drove ECARX's first enterprise LLM subscriptions and built AI-enabled workforce-planning and budgeting tools.
Lean Technologies
Head of Talent (first Operations & People hire)
Sequoia-backed Open Banking for MENA · Sequoia's first Middle East investment · London / Riyadh / Dubai
Jun 2021 – Mar 2023
+
  • First ops & people hire; scaled the company 12 → 110 and 2 → 4 offices (London, Dubai, Riyadh, Cairo) as de facto office head, building cohesive culture across markets.
  • Built the leadership bench — recruited the Chief Product Officer, Chief Revenue Officer and Heads of HR & Legal plus a 3-person talent team — acting as connector across global teams.
  • Drove programme management for the company's first Open Banking partnership and Saudi government certification, alongside the CTO, to maintain momentum and execution.
FreeUp
Founding Team
Ethical fintech: real-time earned-wage access disrupting payday lending · London
Mar 2020 – Jun 2021
+
  • Worked alongside co-founders to build the initial proposition, grow the team from 3 to 27 in 6 months and raise £1.2M from the UK Innovation Fund and angel investors — owning B2B partnerships and sales.
  • Helped integrate the real-time payments solution into complex enterprise systems, securing launch clients including several NHS trusts and the London Fire Brigade — positioned as an employee benefit.
Improbable
Chief of Staff & Special Projects, Games Content
SoftBank & a16z-backed SpatialOS company · London / Seattle / Edmonton
Sep 2018 – Mar 2020
+
  • Chief of Staff to the Chief People Officer, then to the Chief Content Officer, Chief Creative Officer and Studio GM through a period of hypergrowth and change.
  • Stood up Improbable's first internal game studio (with ex-BioWare leadership) on its SpatialOS platform; led organisational and resource design for the new games content strategy.
  • Helped execute the acquisition of Midwinter Entertainment and evaluated a further multiplayer-studio acquisition; programme-managed two research-org projects.
  • Worked with the Improbable Enterprise team on highly selective research projects for Microsoft.
Founders Factory
Platform Team
$75M corporate incubator/accelerator & seed fund (Brent Hoberman & Henry Lane Fox) · London
Sep 2016 – Sep 2018
+
  • Joined pre-close of the $75M fund; codified the venture-building operating model — founder toolbox, operational playbooks and spin-out processes used across the portfolio.
  • Worked with 50+ companies from idea to pre-seed and coached a 100+ company accelerator cohort (portfolio has since raised $1bn+ in follow-on funding).
  • Partnered with the investment committee on founder sourcing and selection for new ventures.
  • Subsequently advised Acre, a company launched out of the studio and later acquired by ClearScore.
McKinsey & Company
Consultant, McKinsey Digital — Business Analyst → Associate (yr 1) → Engagement Manager track (yr 2)
Digital business-building practice · London
Sep 2013 – Aug 2016
+
  • Advised multinational clients across telecoms, heavy manufacturing and FMCG — spanning Korea, Saudi Arabia, the US, Germany, the UK and India — on launching and scaling new product propositions (organic & inorganic growth).
  • Built a "digital factory" for a Saudi national oil & gas major: trained 50+ high-potential staff and shipped software in 6-8 week cycles, cutting time-to-live by 60% in a 3-month engagement.
  • Delivered a 100-day growth plan to the CEO of a Korean heavy-industries group, introducing programme-management processes with $40M+ projected savings.
  • Advised the CEO of a US regional bank on a cloud-first transformation, mapping the legacy-to-cloud migration at the heart of a first-100-days agenda.
Selected Work

Things I've built or led.

Most of these live inside enterprise firewalls — case studies rather than open-source repos. The outcomes travel.

Internal · Apps Script + Cowork

Slack2Slides

A Slack-interface presentation builder for commercial teams, leveraging Apps Script and Claude (Cowork). Cut customer/executive report creation from ~4 hours to 15 minutes.

~94% time saved
Internal · Multi-source ingestion

Enterprise Customer-Health Tool

Ingests transcripts, calendar, email and Slack signals to surface account risk and momentum for project & commercial leads.

Deployed across every enterprise account
Internal · AI toolkit & plugin library

AI Toolkit & Plugin Library

Curated and maintained a plugin library and toolbox for project and commercial leads — embedding best practice across the org, with central AI tooling adopted by senior stakeholders.

Expert in Residence · Org-wide
FedRAMP · US Government · 35+ engineers

FedRAMP Programme Turnaround

Took over a critical, time-sensitive US-government FedRAMP programme — joined with only 6 weeks remaining after scoping had consumed half the auditor-recommended 4-month timeline.

Delivered on time · Cited as a best-in-class deployment
Frontier AI labs · First product launch

RL-Environments Product

Project-led Invisible's first RL-environments product end-to-end — from scoping and concepting to customer calls — selling to frontier AI labs, owning pricing and positioning, and bridging off-the-shelf data research with the platform.

First product launch · Frontier-AI customers
ECARX · Post-IPO commercial analytics

$1.38B Lifetime-Order Analytics

Built the commercial analytics, dashboards and insight that underpinned the largest deal in ECARX history outside its parent group ($1.38B lifetime order value), supporting C-suite sales pursuit.

Largest deal in company history (outside parent)
Background

Foundations.

Education

University of Oxford — BA, Philosophy, Politics & Economics (PPE), 2:1 · 2010–2013

  • Member, the Oxford Union (debating society)
  • Member, Oxford Entrepreneurs (the world's largest student-run entrepreneurship society)

Interests & Other

  • Percussion & drums — performed with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra
  • Languages: English (native)
  • Based in London; comfortable operating across UK, EU, US and MENA time zones
Get in touch

Let's talk.

Open to director-level roles in AI transformation and strategy & operations — UK-based, global-remote-friendly. The fastest way is a 30-minute call.

steve.r.lloyd@gmail.com LinkedIn GitHub Download CV (PDF)
Schedule a 30-min call ↗