AI Engineer

Salary: £92,701 - £119,966

Location: Manchester

Hours: Full time

Working Pattern: Hybrid, 40% (or two days) in our Manchester office location

What you’ll be doing:

• Developing the upcoming era of autonomous AI for colleagues and customers, ensuring safety, security, and scalability.
• Setting technical direction and leading multiple teams to design, build and run AI agents on Google Cloud, blending open‑source tools with GCP native services.
• Staying hands‑on when needed and helping grow engineering capability while delivering outcomes at pace in a regulated environment.
• Working closely with Engineering, Product and Architecture teams to define the strategy and technical direction for agentic AI services, establishing standards, patterns and quality expectations.
• Leading and developing multiple engineering teams, fostering a high‑performing, inclusive culture while delivering resilient and scalable solutions.
• Designing, building and operating AI agents on Google Cloud using services such as Vertex AI, Cloud Run, GKE, BigQuery and IAM, integrating securely with enterprise systems and following modern engineering practices including CI/CD, automated testing, SRE and observability.
• Having responsibility for the full solution lifecycle, ensuring platforms are secure, compliant, resilient and cost‑effective through robust guardrails, model evaluation, FinOps and effective security controls.
• Driving engineering excellence by developing reusable components and standards, leading vendor engagements, simplifying infrastructure and influencing senior stakeholders across the platform.

Qualifications:

• Proficiency in Python and TypeScript, with experience delivering production services (APIs, event‑driven systems, microservices), ideally on GCP.
• Proven technical leadership of large, multi‑team deliveries setting strategy, making sound architectural decisions and enabling teams to deliver at pace.
• Hands‑on experience with agentic AI: building LLM‑powered applications/agents, tool use, orchestration, retrieval (RAG), prompt and safety engineering, evaluation and telemetry.
• Proficient knowledge of cloud‑native engineering: containers (GKE/Cloud Run), Terraform/IaC, CI/CD, automated QA, observability, optimizing performance, and managing incidents.
• Solid knowledge of security, privacy and compliance in regulated environments; confident working with Risk, Security and Legal teams.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to simplify complex concepts into clear, outcome‑focused narratives.
• Experience with Vertex AI Agent Builder/Agentspace, LangGraph, multi‑agent patterns or agent‑to‑agent protocols.
• Knowledge of data governance and model risk practices in financial services.
• Exposure to Azure/AWS or cross‑cloud patterns.
• Experience building communities of practice and engineering guilds.

Benefits:

• A wide‑ranging benefits package, including a generous pension contribution of up to 15%.
• An annual performance‑related bonus.
• Flexible benefits that adapt to your lifestyle (e.g., discounted shopping).
• 30 days' holiday plus bank holidays.
• Wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies.

Diversity