AI Engineering Lead

About IAG.ai

IAG.ai is a new growing team within the International Airlines Group (British Airways, Iberia, Vueling, Aer Lingus, IAG Loyalty, IAG Cargo, IAG Tech), with a mission to accelerate time to value and our market position through the use of Artificial Intelligence, working with multiple Operating Companies across the IAG group.

We are seeking a dynamic and experienced Principal Engineer to join our IAG.ai team. As a Principal Engineer, you will play a crucial role in leveraging data and tools to uncover valuable insights, drive data-driven decision-making, and support our organization's goals.

As the AI Engineering Lead, you will be pivotal in driving material EBIT impact through application of AI across the Group. Reporting to the Group Head of Software Engineering and aligned to the Group’s Head of AI, you will be accountable for ensuring technical designs and overarching technology strategy provide an optimal balance between cost, risk, time to value, and all other considerations, for AI solutions and ML platform development.

Critically, you will provide significant input into product architecture for re-usable AI products that can be adopted by more than one part of the Group. In so doing you will maximise re-use potential whilst minimising any associated product premium. This will involve articulating and mitigating technical risks in a disciplined and data-driven manner and supporting development of technical blueprints that left-shift discovery and early value release, and subsequently evolve into fully industrialised enterprise AI products.

You will continuously monitor and reduce internal consumers’ effort required to discover and adopt these AI-powered products by treating colleagues as customers and optimizing the associated journeys. You will also be accountable for the technical direction for AI / ML platforms, including lightweight generative AI abstraction and the route to live and runtime platform for ML development.

You will ensure that all teams operate a structured, agile technical governance process which supports rapid and auditable decision-making with appropriately devolved responsibilities, evidencing conformance to all standards and guardrails for re-usable technical components, design patterns, interfaces and machine learning models.

You will maintain an “always-on” view of the ever-changing external AI landscape, and lead on modelling the costs and benefits of individual generative models and associated implementation approaches (GraphRAG, RAG etc.). You will also work with tech leads and technical architects in all IAG’s AI Labs (currently London and Barcelona) to build an aligned community of enthusiastic, forward-looking pragmatists who continuously challenge themselves to learn and improve as individuals whilst also driving incremental improvements to ROI for AI investments across the Group.

Qualifications

• At least 10 years of experience working in the data science / AI / software domain, with a proven track record of delivery of tangible value (EBIT etc.).
• Experience of successfully leading software products from the technical perspective, ensuring code is developed to high quality and security standards.
• Strong understanding of software development and DevSecOps best practices.
• Enthusiastic, optimistic, forward-looking.
• Airline industry experience (preferred).
• Strong leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to inspire and motivate a diverse and cross-functional team.
• Strategic and analytical thinking, with the ability to translate business problems and opportunities into potential AI solutions and actions.
• Ability to frame complex technical considerations for consumption by time-poor executives to support decision-making and education.

Additional Information

Benefits

The chance to enjoy a challenging career in an exciting, fast-moving environment in a dynamic industry, working in a multi-cultural environment with great offices in many locations. We aim to provide all our people with a work/life balance, as well as the many benefits offered by a global organisation, including health insurance, pension, and performance bonuses.

Diversity and Inclusion

IAG Tech is part of the IAG GBS organisation, and our people are at the heart of everything we do. We recognise that we can only deliver the required business outcomes if we have a thriving community of technology professionals. Together we strive to become the very best at what we do. We focus on making Tech a great place to work, with a community that we feel proud to belong to. To help make this a reality, our people strategy focuses on six key domains: Engagement, Talent Management, Reward and Recognition, Performance Management, Learning and Development, and Culture.

We understand the importance of Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace to deliver this strategy – everyone should feel part of our team. We want to foster an inclusive workplace, celebrate individuality and embrace differences so that everyone in IAG Tech can achieve their goals and ambitions, regardless of their personal circumstances or background. As a Group, IAG has an ambition that 40% of senior management roles are held by women by 2025. IAG Tech fully supports that ambition, and we are working to help make it a reality. With this in mind, we have set ourselves the challenging target of recruiting 50% female colleagues by 2030.