Peter Dudbridge Head of Engineering, Jua.ai
Previously
Director of Engineering, Thought MachineSoftware Engineer, BBC
Graduate Developer, BBC
Company
Jua.ai offers the world’s first end to end deep learning model for weather forecasting, delivered on an intuitive platform for anyone to customise. Startups, governments and large companies alike can use Jua.ai’s technology to develop global, high frequency and high accuracy weather models within days. The company is based in Switzerland but has team members all over Europe, they have >30 people now. The seed funding is backed Mehdi Ghissassi (Director and Head of Product, DeepMind) and Siraj Khaliq (Partner at Atomico).
Search Background
Jua.ai needed an experienced, stage-appropriate engineering leader to help them scale and build the technology ready for Series A. They chose Erevena due to Maddy’s relationship with the Founder, Andreas, and our track record of successfully executing similar searches. They needed someone who could scale the engineering team (4-20 journey), whilst building a real-time, ML/AI technology platform managing petabytes of data.
Requirements
The candidate needed to have a deep understanding of modern and complex technologies and engineering practices (Cloud, ML, Deep Learning etc), as well as having experience of recruiting and structuring engineering teams. They also needed to balance being hands-on with being strategic, whilst building and scaling machine learning & high performing distributed systems. Jua.ai were also looking for someone who was passionate about technology for good, had strong communication and stakeholder management skills – specifically in supporting them as they looked to close Series A, and scale the business further.
Our search was focused on VPs and Heads of Engineering who had operated within highly regulated/complex industries – which relied upon real-time systems, fed by vast data sets, this included HealthTech, FinTech, simulation/VR/AR businesses, and other GreenTech/Climate Tech businesses. Specifically, we targeted those who had experienced early-stage scaling (5-20-50 journey), who had experience both setting up teams for scaled success, but could also be hands on in coding reviews, design decisions etc.
Result
We ended up placing Peter Dudbridge as Head of engineering. Peter Dudbridge came from Thought Machine where he was hired as the third Engineer; he had been part of the leadership team that scaled them from 3 to 300 engineers and had seen them raise several funding rounds whilst working under a founding CTO in a similar guise to Jua.ai. Peter has a very detailed understanding of ML and High-Volume data systems from his time at Thought Machine, and was incredibly passionate about technology, actively participating in the wider technology industry.
Andreas Brenner
Founder & CEO
We worked with Maddy and Emily at Erevena to search for an Engineering leader to take us from Seed to Series A. They helped us find Peter Dudbridge, an outstanding technical leader with an entrepreneurial mindset. Peter had a strong following of good people, hit the ground running and quickly established best practices. We appreciate him from both a professional and personal point of view and could not think of a better match. Erevena were extremely helpful in setting the search criteria as well as identifying a small number of very high-quality candidates who fitted these criteria.
