Lead AI Engineer

Salary: £70,000 - 108,000 per year

Requirements:

• Extensive backend engineering experience building production services such as APIs and microservices, with strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience developing technical architecture and designs and taking them through enterprise review processes.
• Experience delivering cloud solutions on AWS, including deploying, operating and troubleshooting services in live environments.
• Working knowledge of modern DevOps practices such as CI/CD, containerisation and monitoring.
• Solid backend engineering experience designing, building and running reliable services in production, with attention to performance, resilience and security.
• Direct experience building and operating solutions on AWS, including AWS AI services and the supporting platform services required for production delivery.
• AI engineering experience delivering LLM-enabled systems using LLM APIs/Bedrock, including RAG architectures, vector databases and orchestration frameworks.
• DevOps skills including CI/CD pipelines, containerisation and monitoring/observability, with experience defining release and operating practices for AI services.
• Experience leading engineering teams, providing technical guidance, aligning on standards and patterns, and adapting plans to resolve delivery and operational challenges.
• Demonstrable capability in prompt design and in setting evaluation/testing approaches for LLM solutions, including defining measurable success criteria.

Responsibilities:

• Standardise and advance reusable AI solution patterns and reference architectures to improve cross-team consistency and delivery quality.
• Establish end-to-end technical architectures for LLM-enabled systems, covering data pipelines, retrieval/RAG, prompt orchestration and agent workflows.
• Analyse complex constraints across product, data, security, legal and operations, translating them into clear standards and recommendations.
• Enhance CI/CD pipelines for AI systems by introducing automation, traceability and controlled release processes.
• Define monitoring, observability and operational strategies across quality, performance, safety, cost and reliability.
• Set standards for prompt engineering, evaluation and testing to improve solution quality and behavioural consistency.
• Advance digital and data-driven methods by shaping organisational practices and innovation efforts that improve performance and efficiency.
• Collaborate with senior stakeholders to deliver analytics-led solutions that address regulatory challenges and improve decision-making.

Technologies:

• AI
• AWS
• Backend
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• DevOps
• LLM
• RAG
• Security
• microservices
• Support

More:

We are the Data, Technology and Innovation (DTI) division, enabling our group to be a digital-first, data-led smart regulator by delivering a secure, agile and cost-effective technology and data ecosystem. We work alongside our wider AI Programme and partner with business leads across priority areas including Authorisations, SPC, EMO and Anti Money Laundering. This Lead AI Engineer role is based in Leeds or Edinburgh, with a hybrid working model requiring a minimum of 40% in the office each month and 50% for senior leaders. We offer 28 days annual leave plus bank holidays, a non-contributory pension of 8-12% depending on age, and life assurance at eight times salary.

last updated 34 week of 2026