Why we're hiring

UK enterprises hand £66.1 billion a year to consultancies, and hardly any of it can be traced back to a return. We think we know why. Bill by the hour and projects expand, teams bloat and timelines stretch, because that is what pays. The advice is never quite impartial either, since you can rarely tell whose interests it serves.

We work the other way round. We get paid when value is live in production. We sell no licences, so we have no reason to steer anyone anywhere. Our teams stay small and senior, so there is no pyramid to feed and no bench to keep busy.

That only works if the people leading the work are excellent. No analyst layer to hide behind. No methodology to bill against. Nowhere to look busy without being useful.

We have built a lot of this firm already. Engineers who spent years inside Palantir, data leaders who ran strategy at Nike, Shell and Heineken, designers whose work you have almost certainly used, founders who have sat on the other side of the table.

The seat we haven't filled is yours. Someone who can walk in with an investment case, shape the transformation that follows, and then stay to lead it rather than hand it over.

These roles don't come up often. We are around twenty people, well funded, with the work in front of us to become the firm that gets AI running inside the world's largest enterprises. You would be in the leadership of that from here, with share options, so the outcome is partly yours.

What we're building

We were founded for enterprise-wide AI transformation. Not tools. Not pilots. Not a proof of concept that impresses a steering committee and then quietly dies.

The organising idea is what we call the enterprise operating system, the layer that sits above a company's existing systems and lets AI actually run decisions, rather than sitting beside the business producing insight nobody acts on. Small, senior teams work directly alongside client staff to build it, priced on the outcome rather than the hours.

We are deliberately independent on platform. We run a Palantir practice, on a Palantir instance we use for our own business, and a parallel accelerator stack on Databricks and Azure, because most of our clients are already deep in Azure and we would rather extend what they have than sell them a migration they never asked for.

The clients are household names. Mining, energy, consumer healthcare, aviation, industrials, legal, private equity and real estate, mostly enterprise-wide programmes rather than a single function, and mostly the kind of decisions that show up in an annual report.

Clients come to us rather than going direct to a platform for a straightforward reason. We understand the enterprise, we know how to serve it, and we bring the total cost down. Vendors are deliberately vague on pricing and default to asking what it's worth to you. Because we make the introduction and the client trusts us, the engagement starts from a very different place.

The job

Lead clients at the top of the house. Conversations that start with the P&L rather than the platform. Some of those relationships exist already and need a leader. Others you would open yourself.

Build the case for value. Where it sits, what it is worth, what has to change to release it, what it costs and how fast it lands. Our commercials are outcome-based, so your business case becomes the thing we get paid against. Focuses the mind wonderfully.

Design the operating model and roadmap, then lead the delivery. Alongside our engineers and consultants, in the room with them. Engagements run from a few hundred thousand to programmes in the tens of millions, much of it sponsor-backed and impatient.

Shape what we sell. Scoping, pricing, structuring value-share and success fees, and having a real say in which briefs we chase and which we let go.

Raise the people around you. Coaching consultants in how to talk about value, showing them what it looks like to hold a room, setting the standard the next hire is measured against.

A word on the title. We describe partners here as practitioners burdened with organisational functions, which is only half a joke. Partners stay in the work.

What good looks like

Six months in, two or three chief executives take your call, you have taken a significant programme from first conversation to signed work, and the consultants around you talk about value better than they did before you arrived.

A year in, our clients can point at outcomes in production that go straight into a board pack, we are being invited into briefs we would once have been too small for, and the way you lead an engagement has become the way we lead engagements.

What we're looking for

We would struggle without:

• Around fifteen years in consulting, including time somewhere with a serious training culture, and enough client leadership that a hostile executive meeting holds no fear

• Business cases, operating models and roadmaps you built yourself and were then held to

• Range across industries, with two or three you know deeply enough to challenge a client in their own language

• Enterprise technology experience. You know how the stack actually fits together, ERP, cloud, data platforms, and what it really takes to change any of it

• AI-forward, genuinely. You work with these tools every day, you have opinions about them, and you have helped put something into production rather than only advising on the strategy

• Change experience that goes all the way, meaning you stayed until people worked differently, long after the strategy was signed off

• Commercial instinct. Scoping, pricing, negotiating, knowing when a deal is worth having

• A view on what consulting should become, and some frustration with what it currently is

It would help:

• Private equity experience, in a portfolio business, a value creation team, or advising sponsors. A lot of our work runs to a sponsor's clock and you can feel it

• Dutch, if Amsterdam is home

We care more about what you have carried than where you trained. If your background is unusual and the work stands up, write to us anyway.

This isn't for everyone, and that's ok

We move fast, we set the bar high, and we say what we think in the room rather than in a side chat afterwards. That suits some people enormously and wears others out.

If you want a large team beneath you from day one, this will frustrate you. If your strength is the framework rather than the outcome, there is little here for you. If you have spent your career selling work that other people deliver, the adjustment is real, because the person who makes the promise here keeps it. And if you need the answer to exist before you start, we are probably too early for you.

How we work

Five things we hold each other to, and they show up daily rather than on a wall.

Outcome-obsessed. Every decision passes one test, which is whether it makes the client more successful. If a result cannot be measured, it isn't worth achieving. And client outcome doesn't mean client compliance. When the brief is wrong we say so.

Proactive. Nobody here waits to be told. We adapt to ambiguity with structure rather than drama, and we would rather build the prototype than write the hundredth deck. Everyone here is an engineer, at heart or at hand.

Exceptional. If we wouldn't put our names on it, it isn't ready. No AI slop, no half-finished thinking. Pride, though, is not ego, and we drop our own work the moment the evidence turns.

Restless. Engineers learn consulting, consultants learn engineering, and everyone stretches sideways because client problems don't respect discipline boundaries. Figuring something out and keeping it to yourself is half a job done.

Open and honest. We tell clients what they need to hear rather than what they'd like to. With each other, seniority doesn't decide whose idea wins. It's fine to lose it occasionally when you care about something, and equally fine to be called out for it there and then.

Underneath all of it, people come first. Enterprises are sitting on roughly a third more productivity than they are getting, and the gap is almost never the technology. It is confidence, skills, incentives and habits. So we coach in the flow of the work and build capability that outlasts us. If that sounds like the soft part of an engagement, you have misunderstood where the value is.

What we won't ask of you. Four nights a week in a hotel. Chasing a utilisation number. Selling a platform we happen to resell. Writing a deck nobody will act on. Pretending to a certainty you don't have.

What we commit to you

We ask a lot, and we know it, so here is our half of the pact.

Competitive salary depending on experience, plus share options, so you own a piece of what you help build. Pay is decided by a compensation committee against contribution, craft and culture, never by who was loudest in the room.

Four hours of protected learning time every week through Compass, our weekly session where the whole firm shares what it has learned and brings in outside voices. Two coaches from your first week, one inside your discipline and one outside it, and you can change either whenever you like.

No formal departments, no reporting lines, and no tolerance for political games. Instead there are guilds for each craft, practices around the capabilities we are building, and a firm that defaults to oversharing so you always know where things stand.

Flexible working with core hours and a mix of home and office, based in central London or Amsterdam. Private medical and dental cover, mental health support and a wellness programme. Pension contributions. Cycle to work through salary sacrifice.

And people worth spending your week with. Meet the team.

How to apply

Send your CV and anything that shows how you think to careers@valliance.ai, with "Value Partner" in the subject line. A short note on why this rather than the obvious alternatives will get our attention faster than a covering letter.

Four stages, and we move quickly.

1. A call with one of the partners. Your experience, what you want next, and whether our model makes sense to you.

2. Time with the team. The engineers and consultants you would actually be working with.

3. A practical task. A real problem, a couple of hours, and every AI tool you would normally reach for. We want to see how you think with the tools in your hands.

4. A final conversation with the founding partners. As much about the firm as the role. The decision is made together, by everyone who met you.

We reply to everyone.