AI/ML Director in City of Westminster

As a Director of AI/ML within the Commercial and Investment Bank, you will set the vision and lead the enterprise portfolio for agentic AI that automates and optimizes complex business workflows at scale. You will guide cross-functional teams and strategic partners to define reference architectures and delivery roadmaps for multi-agent systems—leveraging LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, and modern agent frameworks—while instituting governance, safety, and reliability standards and tracking measurable business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Architect, develop, and productionize autonomous and assistive AI agents to streamline and enhance operations.
• Design multi-agent systems, including role definition, tool integration, planning, memory, and workflow orchestration using LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, ADK and LangGraph.
• Implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and semantic search using vector databases such as Pinecone and Chroma, including indexing, retrieval policies, and evaluation.
• Build and integrate agent tools (MCP) and APIs to connect agents with external services, databases, and internal systems, ensuring robust output parsing, error handling, and retries.
• Design and implement robust evaluation frameworks to systematically assess and measure the performance of AI agents across key operational metrics.
• Practice advanced prompt and context engineering (e.g., Chain-of-Thought, ReAct, function calling/tool-use prompts), implement output validation and guardrails to reduce hallucinations.
• Deploy scalable AI services to cloud infrastructure, ensuring monitoring, and observability for agent performance.
• Design microservices-based architectures and orchestrate multi-step workflows; instrument agents for tracing, metrics, and feedback loops to continuously improve reliability and utility.
• Partner with stakeholders to define requirements, design intuitive human-AI interfaces (voice, chat), and deliver measurable business impact.
• Analyze data to inform agent capabilities, optimize retrieval, and drive data-driven decision-making; and performance evaluations.
• Mentor and guide team members on agent frameworks, LLM usage, safety, and best practices.

Qualifications

• MSc/PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, or related field.
• Significant proven experience building and deploying AI applications in large scale production environments.
• Experience managing data science teams and coaching team members.
• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn).
• Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, LangGraph, ADK).
• Experience with generative models (transformers, GANs/VAEs; diffusion models a plus).
• Strong understanding of data preprocessing, feature engineering, and evaluation techniques.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience fine-tuning small language models (SLMs) with LoRA, QLoRA, DoRA; quantization and distillation a plus.
• Familiarity with prompt optimization frameworks (AutoPrompt, DSPy) and building evaluation suites.
• Experience with distributed computing, data sharding, and performance optimization.
• Hands-on with AWS AI deployment services (SageMaker, Bedrock) and workflow orchestration.
• Demonstrated experience in financial services, particularly investment banking operations.