Lead Architect for Enterprise Agentic AI in London

What does the job involve? Shape how Equinor designs and scales agentic AI solutions—working at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and responsible AI. Equinor is building the foundation for enterprise‑scale agentic AI, and this role offers a rare opportunity to play a key role in that journey. You will architect solutions, make key design decisions, guide delivery with AI and ML engineering teams, and ship production systems that automate workflows and sharpen decisions across multiple business areas.

What will my tasks be?

• Shape and apply reference architecture for agentic systems, translating standards, design principles, and guardrails into practical solution patterns across Equinor.
• Architect and deliver production agents: orchestration, grounded retrieval, structured LLM integrations with enterprise APIs, MCP‑based tool/data access, and multimodal document understanding.
• Drive solution strategy, technology choices, and architectural blueprints for key use cases; align stakeholders, engineering teams, and partners; and provide technical leadership from concept through scaled deployment.
• Embed safety, compliance, and privacy by design; align with GDPR and the EU AI Act; enforce policy as code and safe tool execution; and manage uncertainty in non‑deterministic systems by surfacing confidence, bounding autonomy, routing to human oversight, and providing safe fallback and rollback paths.
• Raise the bar on engineering quality and long‑term capability by improving performance, reliability, and cost efficiency, while mentoring peers and building reusable foundations for future AI solutions.

Here's what we expect from you:

At Equinor, there are some overall qualities we regard as essential. We want you to identify with the values that guide our decisions and help us succeed and grow: open, collaborative, courageous and caring. We expect you to make safety your priority and to contribute to our zero‑harm culture. And for this specific position, we are also looking for:

Required qualifications

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, Linguistics, or related field.
• Strong architectural experience across data, model, and application layers, with sound judgment on trade‑offs, scalability, risk, and compliance in enterprise AI systems.
• Proven ability to navigate ambiguity, set technical direction within a broader architecture, align stakeholders, and convert strategy into delivery.
• Hands‑on with modern LLMs and agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen, LangChain/LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel).
• NLP and generative AI expertise, including prompt design, RAG architectures, model evaluation, and practical experience with major LLM providers and open‑source models.
• Solid Python and software engineering fundamentals (testing, CI/CD, version control).
• Track record of delivering AI solutions from concept to production, with measurable business impact.

Preferred qualifications

• Technical leadership: mentoring, communities, publishing, speaking, or open‑source contributions.
• Multimodal AI: document and image understanding, diagram Q&A, speech‑to‑text.
• Responsible AI: PII handling, red‑team‑ing, content moderation, risk assessment, regulatory compliance.
• Containers and cloud: Docker, Kubernetes; Azure (Azure ML, AKS, Azure OpenAI, storage, networking).
• Integration: APIs, events/messaging, standardised data and tool access via MCP.

What can we offer you?

We want you to have a rewarding and fulfilling work life. That’s why we offer:

• Not just a job - a career. In Equinor, your development begins on day one. You will build your competence through a wide range of learning activities while being empowered to build your career across multiple disciplines and geographies. Our internal job market allows a wide range of opportunities for development and growth within your own field, or even in other areas you find interesting and relevant.
• Attractive rewards. We give you a comprehensive benefits package with a competitive salary, global parental leave, bonus scheme and pension plan.
• Wellness and work‑life balance. We care about and prioritise our employees’ well‑being. We know that for you to be the best version of yourself in the workplace, being able to collect your children, attend a class or simply enjoy social time can be invaluable. That’s why we encourage you to make use of our flexible work arrangements wherever possible.
• An inclusive culture. We believe embracing our differences makes us stronger. For us, true inclusion means being able to bring your whole self to work, and for you and everyone else to feel accepted and valued.
• Equal opportunities for everyone. Equinor is an equal‑opportunity employer. We make all employment decisions, which include hiring, promotion, transfer, demotion, termination, and training, without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, marital status, parental status, veteran status, or any other protected status.

As part of this commitment, reasonable adjustments will be made during the recruitment process for candidates with disabilities or long‑term health conditions. If you have any specific requirements, please clarify this in your application and our team will be in contact to see how we can support your needs. We also believe everyone should be paid fairly and consistently for their contribution to our collective success. To ensure fairness and transparency, positions at Equinor are evaluated using our global job architecture based on the position’s responsibilities, complexity, and impact, and regularly reviewed to ensure consistency and alignment across the organisation.