Senior AI Engineer

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

You will join at a pivotal stage of our AI transformation as we move 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. Working in close partnership with our AI Product Manager and alongside the AI Engineering Lead you will design build deploy and operate robust secure and compliant AI solutions within a regulated banking environment.

This is a hands-on high-impact role for an engineer who wants to own things end-to-end. You will take AI products and shared platform capabilities from prototype through to production and youll take on some of our most demanding technical challenges. Chief among them is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) at scale: building retrieval and generation pipelines that stay accurate fast and cost-effective across large corpora.

You will also help raise the bar for how the whole team builds embedding the controls production AI needs such as evaluation observability and responsible-AI guardrails. Youll also be mentoring other engineers as the team grows.

Key Responsibilities

• Design build and operate end-to-end AI systems (LLM/RAG pipelines retrieval and agentic workflows) from prototype through to production.

• Own AI products and shared reusable platform capabilities end-to-end enabling teams across the Bank to adopt AI without building from scratch.

• Develop deep expertise in our AI platform and applications with a good working understanding of other domains across the Bank (lending data risk and operations).

• Tackle our hardest technical problems in particular retrieval-augmented generation at scale across large corpora.

• Build and maintain the controls that production AI depends on (evaluation frameworks observability testing and CI/CD).

• Embed responsible-AI principles (explainability guardrails and appropriate governance) within a regulated environment.

• Design well-documented self-service APIs that other teams can adopt independently.

• Lead projects independently unblocking your own work and unblocking others across the team.

• Mentor and support other AI Engineers through pairing code review and pragmatic engineering standards.

• Support engineers in the wider Shawbrook Engineering department with AI adoption and upskilling.

• Work within an agile cross-functional squad to deliver iteratively and aligned to business value.

Qualifications :

Essential

• You have designed built and deployed LLM and machine-learning systems in production ideally including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

• Confident building backend services and APIs in Python with sound testing observability and CI/CD practices.

• Experience delivering on a major cloud platform preferably Azure.

• Comfortable evaluating AI systems for accuracy and reliability and with the controls needed to run them responsibly.

• You can take work from idea to production independently and enjoy owning it end-to-end.

• Experience mentoring and leading others.

• Relevant academic background in Computer Science Data Science Engineering Mathematics or related discipline.

Nice to have

• Experience with semantic or vector search at scale including performance and cost tuning.

• Professional certifications in cloud platforms (e.g. Azure AI Engineer Associate) would be beneficial.

• Background in machine learning engineering/operations.

• Exposure (some of our services -based).

• Experience in regulated environments.

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 27 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

Department / Functional Area: Engineering
Experience: years
Vacancy: 1