Principal Engineer – Risk Decisioning & Agentic AI – BPL

Purpose of the Role: To drive technical excellence and innovation by leading the design and implementation of robust software solutions, providing mentorship to engineering teams, fostering cross‑functional collaboration, and contributing to strategic planning to ensure the delivery of high‑quality solutions aligned with business objectives.

Accountabilities:

• Provision of guidance and expertise to engineering teams to ensure alignment with best practices and foster a culture of technical excellence.
• Contribution to strategic planning by aligning technical decisions with business goals, anticipating future technology trends, and providing insights to optimise product roadmaps.
• Design and implementation of complex, scalable, and maintainable software solutions, considering long‑term viability and business objectives.
• Mentoring and coaching to junior and mid‑level engineers to foster professional growth and knowledge sharing, elevating the overall skillset and capabilities of the organization.
• Collaboration with business partners, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions and ensure a cohesive approach to product development.
• Innovation within the organisation by identifying and incorporating new technologies, methodologies, and industry practices into the engineering process.

Vice President Expectations:

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies and processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalations.
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, plan for the department’s future needs and operations, counsel employees on performance, and contribute to employee pay decisions and changes.
• For an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within their discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi‑year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long‑term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions.
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross‑functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business. Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In‑depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions. Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem‑solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues are expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – the moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.

Principal Engineer – Key Responsibilities:

• A fantastic opportunity to join as a Principal Engineer where you will drive technical excellence and innovation by leading the design and implementation of robust software solutions.
• Turn fraud, credit risk, financial crime, compliance and regulatory needs into clear technology requirements.
• Provide mentorship to engineering teams, foster cross‑functional collaboration, and contribute to strategic planning to ensure the delivery of high‑quality solutions aligned with business objectives.

Qualifications and Skills:

• Deep expertise in designing and building enterprise‑grade AI agents, multi‑agent systems, LLM‑powered orchestration, real‑time decisioning engines, human‑in‑the‑loop workflows, and autonomous risk services.
• Proven experience building highly scalable, resilient, cloud‑native platforms leveraging event‑driven architectures, microservices, streaming technologies, APIs, and real‑time processing at enterprise scale.
• Hands‑on expertise developing mission‑critical risk platforms supporting credit risk, fraud detection, underwriting, KYC/KYB, AML, Financial Crime, customer onboarding, and real‑time decision management.
• Experience operationalising AI/ML solutions, including model lifecycle management, feature engineering, vector databases, RAG architectures, AI governance and production‑scale MLOps.
• Knowledge of payment, acquiring, merchant services, consumer lending, regulatory compliance, model risk management and responsible AI within highly regulated environments.
• Experience building modern data platforms incorporating data mesh/Lakehouse architectures, real‑time analytics, graph technologies, observability and large‑scale data processing.
• Relevant technical skills may include but are not limited to risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen, strategic thinking and digital and technology skills.

Location and Work Environment:

The successful candidate will be based in London. Offices are located at 1 Churchill Place and 7 Westferry Circus (new BPL office). Hybrid working with a required 3 days per week office presence.