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 - It’s important you strike the right balance between your work and personal life. We provide benefits to support you when at work and when you’re 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 - We’re 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