AI Engineering Lead

We are seeking an experienced AI Engineering Lead to lead our AI Engineering squad as we scale our in-house artificial intelligence capability across Shawbrook Bank.

This role joins us at a pivotal stage of our AI transformation and provides a unique opportunity to shape our engineering standards tooling governance and delivery model. This is an exciting and transformative time for Shawbrook as we accelerate moving from experimentation and proof-of-concept initiatives into production-grade AI systems that deliver measurable business value across lending deposits operations risk and customer experience. This role will play a crucial part in embedding scalable secure and value-driven AI capabilities across the Bank.

Working in close partnership with the AI Product Manager you will lead a multidisciplinary squad of AI Engineers and Data Scientists to design build deploy and operate robust secure and compliant AI solutions within a regulated banking environment.

With a strong background in AI/ML engineering within agile delivery teams you will be comfortable architecting end-to-end AI systems from experimentation and model development through to MLOps monitoring and production deployment. You will combine strategic thinking with hands-on technical leadership remaining close to the code while guiding your team through best practices in software engineering data engineering and responsible AI.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical direction and engineering leadership for the AI Engineering squad setting standards for high-quality production-grade AI solutions.
• Partner closely with the AI Product Manager to translate business priorities into technical roadmaps delivery plans and scalable architectures.
• Lead the design and implementation of end-to-end AI systems from data pipelines and model development through to deployment and monitoring.
• Establish and evolve best practices for AI engineering including MLOps CI/CD testing observability and model lifecycle management.
• Ensure AI solutions meet non-functional requirements including security performance scalability resilience and regulatory compliance.
• Embed responsible AI principles including explainability fairness bias monitoring and appropriate model governance controls.
• Remain hands-on where required supporting complex technical challenges reviewing code and guiding architectural decisions.
• Manage mentor and develop AI Engineers fostering a culture of innovation accountability and continuous improvement.
• Contribute to recruitment workforce planning and capability development within the AI Engineering function.
• Define and track engineering metrics to measure system reliability model performance and business impact driving ongoing optimisation.

Qualifications :

Qualifications

• AI/ML Engineering Experience Significant experience designing building and deploying machine learning and AI (specifically agentic generative AI) solutions in production environments with particular focus on scalable cloud-native architectures (preferably Azure) within microservices-based ecosystems.
• MLOps & Deployment Frameworks Experience implementing and maintaining MLOps frameworks and tooling in Azure (preferred) and AWS (beneficial) environments covering the full model lifecycle including experimentation versioning CI/CD deployment monitoring and retraining strategies.
• Design develop and maintain production - grade ML pipelines and services using Python and relevant frameworks (e.g. MLflow Azure ML Databricks FastAPI TensorFlow PyTorch or similar).
• Data & Platform Engineering Strong understanding of data engineering principles including feature engineering data pipelines API integration and working with structured and unstructured datasets in secure regulated environments.
• Leadership Skills A motivational leader of people with the ability to mentor and guide AI Engineers and Data Scientists delegate effectively and provide constructive technical and performance feedback to team members.
• Architecture & Engineering Standards Experience defining engineering standards architectural patterns and best practices for scalable secure and maintainable AI systems.
• Responsible AI & Governance Understanding of model risk management explainability bias mitigation validation and documentation requirements particularly within regulated financial services environments.
• Process Improvement The ability to assess and evolve engineering processes tooling and delivery models to better suit the changing needs of the team and business.
• Agile Delivery Experience working within agile cross-functional delivery teams to ensure AI solutions are delivered iteratively reliably and aligned to business value.
• Relevant academic background in Computer Science Data Science Engineering Mathematics or related discipline. Professional certifications in cloud platforms (e.g. Azure AI Engineer Associate) would be beneficial.

Additional Information :

Your Wellbeing - We take your health and well-being very seriously by providing a range of benefits to give you and your family peace of mind. These include:

• Market leading family friendly policies such as access to our Maternity Adoption and Paternity policies from Day 1 of your employment
• Free access to Headspace a mindfulness & meditation digital health app
• Free access to Peppy digital health app that offers personalised support through fertility treatment becoming a parent or menopause
• EAP (Employee Assistance Programme) - Offering you support on a wide range of subjects including financial concerns mental wellbeing and more general queries around family work housing and health
• Cycle to work scheme
• Discounts on gym membership
• Contributory pension scheme & death in service

Your Lifestyle - Its important you strike the right balance between your work and personal life. We provide benefits to support you when at work and when youre enjoying your leisure time.

• Minimum of 25 days holiday per year
• Option to buy or sell holiday days through our flexi-holiday scheme
• Discounts on gym membership nationwide
• Access to discounts on a range of high street and online brands
• Community support and charitable giving

Your Contribution - Were focused on rewarding those that go the extra mile in helping us achieve our goals.

• Participation in our annual discretionary bonus scheme designed to reward your contribution to our success
• Proudly Shawbrook recognition scheme focused on recognising our role models and thanking our colleagues for a job well done

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time