Senior AI Architect: Agentic & Generative Systems Leader in London

Shape the AI foundation of one of Europe’s leading energy companies—defining how agentic systems are designed, governed, and scaled for mission‑critical impact. Equinor is building the foundation for enterprise‑scale agentic AI, and this role offers a unique opportunity to set direction at company scale. You will define architecture and guide the delivery of agent and LLM‑powered products that reshape how insight is generated, workflows are automated, and decisions are supported across engineering, operations, HSE, supply chain, and corporate functions.

What will my tasks be?

• Define and evolve the enterprise reference architecture for agentic and generative AI, establishing the standards, decision principles, and guardrails that will shape how these capabilities scale across Equinor.
• Partner with AI and ML engineering teams to deliver production‑grade agentic systems: orchestration, grounded retrieval, structured LLM integrations with enterprise APIs, MCP‑based tool/data access, and multimodal document understanding.
• Lead solution strategy, technology choices, and architectural blueprints; align senior stakeholders, engineering teams, and strategic partners; and provide technical leadership from early 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 engineering quality and long‑term capability by driving performance, reliability, and cost efficiency while mentoring others and building reusable foundations for future AI solutions.

Here's what we expect from you:

We want you to identify with our core values: open, collaborative, courageous and caring. We expect you to make safety your priority and contribute to our zero‑harm culture. Additionally we are looking for:

Required qualifications

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, Linguistics, or related field.
• Deep architectural experience across data, model, and application layers, with strong judgment on trade‑offs, scalability, risk, and compliance in enterprise AI systems.
• Proven leadership in navigating ambiguity, shaping technical direction, aligning senior stakeholders, and translating AI strategy into business‑aligned execution.
• Hands‑on experience 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).
• A strong track record of delivering end‑to‑end AI solutions from concept to measurable business value.

Preferred qualifications

• Recognized thought leadership through mentoring, publishing, speaking, patents, or stewardship of influential open‑source initiatives.
• Multimodal AI: document and image understanding, diagram Q&A, speech‑to‑text (e.g. Whisper).
• Responsible AI: PII handling, red‑teaming, content moderation, risk assessment, regulatory compliance.
• Containers and cloud: Docker, Kubernetes; Azure (Azure ML, AKS, Azure OpenAI, storage, networking).
• Enterprise 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, including:

• Career development from day one with learning activities and internal job market.
• Competitive salary, global parental leave, bonus scheme, and pension plan.
• Flexible work arrangements and focus on work‑life balance.
• Inclusive culture that embraces differences.

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.

Important notes about the application process

We expect you to openly offer all relevant information about yourself during the recruitment process. Background checks are performed on all final candidates, and all permanent and temporary hires will be screened using relevant sanctions lists to ensure compliance with sanctions laws. When applying for a job in Norway you will be asked for information on affiliation to high‑risk countries for a security assessment.