At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead the development of innovative AI solutions and enhance operational efficiency.
- Company: Join the FCA, a key player in regulating UK financial services.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, 28 days annual leave, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Collaborative environment with a focus on innovation and career advancement.
- Why this job: Shape the future of finance with cutting-edge AI technology and impactful projects.
- Qualifications: Extensive backend engineering and AI experience, particularly with AWS and LLM systems.
The predicted salary is between 72100 - 108000 £ per year.
This role is graded as: Technical Specialist – Regulatory.
About the FCA and team:
We regulate financial services firms in the UK, to keep financial markets fair, thriving and effective. By joining us, you’ll play a key part in protecting consumers, driving economic growth, and shaping the future of UK finance services.
The Data, Technology and Innovation (DTI) division enables the FCA to be a digital-first, data-led smart regulator by delivering a secure, agile, and cost-effective technology and data ecosystem that drives better decisions, transparency, and operational efficiency. Working alongside the wider AI Programme, the department will partner with business leads to shape and deliver work in priority areas — Authorisations, SPC, EMO and Anti‑Money Laundering.
Role responsibilities:
- Standardise and advance reusable AI solution patterns and reference architectures, improving cross-team consistency and delivery quality to enable more reliable and scalable product development.
- Establish end-to-end technical architectures for LLM-enabled systems, covering data pipelines, retrieval/RAG, prompt orchestration and agent workflows to support robust and effective AI implementation.
- Analyse complex constraints across product, data, security, legal and operations, translating them into clear standards and recommendations to enable delivery of highly complex AI solutions.
- Enhance CI/CD pipelines for AI systems, introducing automation, traceability and controlled release processes to ensure safe and repeatable deployments.
- Define monitoring, observability and operational strategies, improving visibility across quality, performance, safety, cost and reliability to support effective issue diagnosis and resolution.
- Set standards for prompt engineering, evaluation and testing, enhancing solution quality and behavioural consistency to support teams in resolving complex model challenges.
- Advance digital and data-driven methods by shaping organisational practices and innovation efforts that produce measurable improvements in performance and efficiency.
- Collaborate with senior stakeholders to deliver analytics-led solutions, addressing regulatory challenges and generating organisational impact to contribute to improved decision-making and long-term economic outcomes.
Skills required:
Minimum:
- Extensive backend engineering experience building production services such as APIs and microservices with solid software engineering fundamentals combined with experience developing technical architecture and designs and taking them through enterprise review processes.
- Experience delivering cloud solutions on AWS including deploying, operating and troubleshooting services in live environments.
- Working knowledge of modern DevOps practices such as CI/CD, containerisation and monitoring with experience collaborating with engineers to deliver iteratively.
Essential:
- Solid backend engineering experience, with experience designing, building and running reliable services in production (performance, resilience and security).
- Direct experience building and operating solutions on AWS, including AWS AI services and the supporting platform services required for production delivery.
- AI engineering experience delivering LLM-enabled systems using LLM APIs/Bedrock, including RAG architectures, vector databases and orchestration frameworks.
- DevOps skills including CI/CD pipelines, containerisation and monitoring/observability, with experience defining release and operating practices for AI services.
- Experience Leading Engineering teams: providing technical guidance, aligning on standards/patterns, and adapting plans to resolve delivery and operational challenges.
- Demonstrable capability in prompt design and in setting evaluation/testing approaches for LLM solutions (quality, safety/guardrails and performance), including defining measurable success criteria.
Benefits: 28 days annual leave plus.
Lead AI Engineer in Edinburgh employer: Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
The FCA is an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work environment where you can make a significant impact on the financial services industry. With a strong commitment to employee development, a diverse and inclusive culture, and comprehensive benefits including private healthcare and generous leave, you'll find ample opportunities for growth and collaboration in our Edinburgh, Leeds, and London offices. Join us to be part of a team that values innovation and integrity while shaping the future of UK finance.
Contact Details:
Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Recruitment Team
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