Senior Manager - Microsoft AI Technical Architect - TC - FS in London

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Senior Manager - Microsoft AI Technical Architect - TC - FS
The opportunity
This is a senior technical architecture role for a hands‑on leader who designs and delivers secure, scalable Microsoft AI and agentic solutions for financial services clients. The role owns solution architecture from discovery and option assessment through detailed design, build, integration, testing, deployment and operational handover.
The Senior Manager will work with CIO, CTO, CDO, CAIO, enterprise architecture, engineering, data, security, risk and business teams. They will translate business and control requirements into practical architectures, make clear platform and integration decisions, and lead multidisciplinary teams to turn those designs into production capability.
The role requires depth across Microsoft AI services, AI integration, identity management, and low‑code platforms. It also requires the judgement to select the right boundary between Copilot Studio, Cowork, Autopilots, Power Platform, Azure AI Foundry and custom Azure / AI services.
Strong relationships with Microsoft teams are important. The Senior Manager will support technical validation, reference architecture alignment, co‑sell and co‑build activity with Microsoft, solution showcases and follow‑on pipeline growth.
Your key responsibilities
Solution architecture and technical design
Lead architecture discovery across business journeys, applications, data, integration, identity, security, controls and non‑functional requirements.
Create current‑state and target‑state architectures, architecture decision records, integration patterns, data flows, trust boundaries, deployment views and technical roadmaps.
Decompose business use cases into agents, tools, workflows, data products, APIs, human approval points and operational controls.
Make and defend platform choices across Cowork, Autopilots, Copilot Studio, Power Platform, Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Fabric and supporting Azure / AI services.
Design agent orchestration, grounding, tool invocation, memory and context handling, fallback behaviour, observability and failure recovery.
Define non‑functional requirements covering scalability, latency, resilience, availability, supportability, cost, performance and recoverability.
Integration, data and enterprise architecture
Design secure integration with systems of record using certified connectors, Microsoft Graph, Dataverse, REST and SOAP APIs, Azure API Management, event or messaging patterns, data pipelines and Model Context Protocol (MCP) where it adds clear value.
Work with Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, ServiceNow and other enterprise platforms, while accommodating legacy services, shared service accounts, rate limits and systems without usable real‑time APIs.
Design governed grounding and retrieval using Microsoft Fabric, OneLake, curated data products.
Define write‑back patterns, transaction boundaries, idempotency, reconciliation and approval controls for actions that update systems of record.
Security, governance and responsible AI
Embed secure‑by‑design and responsible‑AI controls in the architecture, including identity propagation, least privilege, environment separation, secrets management, private networking and tenant boundaries.
Working with our Cyber team, apply Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Purview, sensitivity labelling, data loss prevention, auditability and retention requirements to AI solution design.
Design human‑in‑the‑loop checkpoints before client‑facing activity, credit or risk decisions, and writes to systems of record; include rejection, resumption and evidence paths.
Define consolidated logging and traceability for prompts, retrieved context, tool calls, model outputs, approvals, actions and exceptions.
Work with security, privacy, model risk, compliance and second‑line teams to evidence design decisions and prepare solutions for architecture and control approval.
Build, engineering and production readiness
Lead technical workstreams from architecture into prototypes, proofs of concept, MVPs, pilots and scaled production services.
Guide and, where needed, contribute hands‑on to the configuration or build of Copilot Studio agents, Power Platform solutions. Support with Azure AI Foundry agents and additional Azure components.
Define engineering standards, development environments, source control, CI/CD, solution packaging, testing, release management and operational support models.
Establish evaluation strategies for non‑deterministic systems using golden datasets, prompt and tool‑selection regression, adversarial and prompt‑injection testing, shadow running and sampled human review.
Lead performance, resilience, security and operational‑readiness testing, including monitoring, alerting, cost management and service support.
Manage technical risks, dependencies, design changes, architecture debt and delivery quality.
Technical leadership and Microsoft ecosystem
Act as the senior technical design authority for client engagements and present recommendations to architecture boards, design authorities and steering groups.
Lead and coach solution architects, AI engineers, data engineers, integration specialists, platform engineers and low‑code developers.
Build strong day‑to‑day relationships with Microsoft