AI Controls Senior Manager in Leeds

Salary: £92,700pa to £109,000pa plus an extensive benefits package.

Locations: Leeds or Edinburgh.

Hours: Full-time

Working Pattern: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, at one of our office sites.

Lloyds Banking Group puts customers at the heart of everything. Data & AI Science forms a key part of our strategy, and as the AI Controls Senior Manager you will be contributing to the largest ever transformation in the history of financial services and ensuring you are protecting our customers in the process. This is a fantastic opportunity to support the Insurance, Pensions & Investments (IP&I) business and play a pivotal role in transforming how the business area works. You'll help us protect our customers through the modernization of processes and tools - bringing innovation, automation, and advanced analytics to the heart of their decision-making.

This is a key role sitting within our IP&I Chief Controls Office, where you'll be at the forefront of supporting IP&I to embed automation and Data Science ensuring appropriate controls exist on models and processes, enabling smarter, faster, and more scalable solutions. As the AI Controls Senior Manager, you will play a pivotal role in independently testing, reviewing and providing SME input and appropriate challenge and support for any IP&I AI models ensuring the customer is protected. This will also involve developing, operating and maintaining machine learning solutions to monitor and test appropriate outcomes for customers. You will provide technical leadership, shape the capability roadmap, and ensure the delivery of high-quality models. You will be mentoring and guiding the AI controls team while fostering knowledge sharing and industry best practices.

Your role would include the following activities:

• AI Controls: Lead the design and development of controls, identifying innovative ways to automate and enable the business to build AI models at scale without slowing down productivity or adding in unnecessary barriers. Apply appropriate data science techniques to develop and/or tune models and evaluate performance. You will own and evolve the IP&I AI control and monitoring framework. In addition to leading control testing, assurance and remediation tracking for AI use cases.
• Collaboration: Lead and work within cross-functional teams comprising of business leaders, product managers, risk specialists, data scientists, data engineers and ML/AI engineers.
• Responsible AI Governance: Partner with the Group Responsible AI team to embed robust ethical principles, bias mitigation techniques, and regulatory compliance into all AI development workflows. You will represent IP&I at Group Governance meetings.
• Team Mentorship: Coach and mentor junior data scientists and AI engineers, helping to grow team capabilities and fostering a culture of continuous learning and curiosity.
• Continuous Learning: Maintain an active view of emerging tools and techniques. Develop proof-of-concepts to demonstrate new capabilities. Guide the team in solving complex AI use cases and improving existing approaches. You will develop AI models and analytics to strengthen control monitoring.

About you: We're keen to speak to candidates with experience who have strong skills in:

• Foundation Model Application: Minimum 5 years' experience with Foundation Models. Understands the theoretical underpinnings of Foundation Models and engages in creative problem-solving using them. Can prioritise decisions effectively, balancing innovation with practicality to solve complex challenges.
• Machine Learning: Experience to situationally assess and advise on the most appropriate Machine Learning solution to tackle existing and new scenarios. Troubleshoots and fixes model performance issues with the fitted models. Is able to use advanced methods such as forecasting, ensemble methods and model stacking.
• Python: Has a holistic understanding, with 5 years+ experience in Python and can make intuitive decisions in familiar contexts. Capable of implementing multi-threading and asynchronous programming using tools like threading and asyncio. Optimize performance using profiling tools and apply advanced debugging techniques.
• AI Literacy: Designing workflows that integrate AI, anticipating AI behaviour, and adapts usage creatively. Coaches others and contributes to AI strategy discussions.
• Control Testing: Experience of designing and applying appropriate controls and ideally have experience of testing, putting the customer at the heart of everything we do.
• Google Cloud Platform: Capable of end-to-end delivery of products on GCP following standard architectures and templates. Takes key decisions on implementation.
• Leadership: Have task and/or line managed teams of 10+ colleagues to deliver strategic initiatives.

We know that great talent comes from many backgrounds. Whilst this job advert may reference specific years of experience, we recognise that skills are developed in many ways, so if you have relevant, transferable experience, we encourage you to apply.

This is a place for you: Our ambition is to be the leading UK business for diversity, equity and inclusion supporting our customers, colleagues and communities, and we're committed to creating an environment in which everyone can thrive, learn and develop. We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer Initiative. We offer reasonable workplace adjustments for colleagues with disabilities, including flexibility in office attendance, location and working patterns. And, as a Disability Confident Leader, we guarantee interviews for a fair and proportionate number of applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the role with a disability, long-term health or neurodivergent condition through the Disability Confident Scheme. We provide reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process to reduce or remove barriers. Just let us know what you need.

Ready to make an impact? Apply today.