Senior AI Engineer

One of the key priorities at LPPI is ensuring that our people work every day in an empowered, supportive, diverse and inclusive culture. Practically, this means recognising and valuing the uniqueness of every individual in terms of background, experience, beliefs and circumstances. This starts with the recruitment process, where we partner with agencies who share our common goal and advertise on a variety of job boards to access the broadest spectrum of candidates. And once successful applicants are on board, we trust our people to work in the way that works best for them which typically involves a mix of office and home working plus an engagement model to ensure frequent two-way feedback.

We are very proud of our culture at LPPI and the benefits it brings to both our people and the business. But don’t just take our word for it! Recently, we invited our entire workforce to describe in three words what is great about us and they said – our people, flexibility and collaboration.

LPPI is an in-house investment business authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. LPPI operates in the pension fund sector, managing the assets of several public sector pension schemes. LPPI has a portfolio of applications and data solutions that are hosted on Microsoft Azure and Power Platform services, such as Azure SQL Database, Synapse Workspace Analytics, Python notebooks, Power BI Reports, Power Apps, Power Automate flows, Kubernetes, Rest APIs and App Services.

LPPI requires an experienced Senior AI Engineer who can deliver and support a pipeline of technical solutions approved by the Business Change Office, where each solution is aligned with established business needs and objectives. Responsibilities include delivery of end-to-end Business IT changes, from translating Business Analysis to technical requirements, architecture, development, testing, deployment and supporting of production services.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical analysis on new Change Briefs that come into the Business Change Office to understand the nature of the change, impact on current processes, data, operating model, and assessing against future-state TOM and LPPI’s design principles.
• For approved changes, elicit requirements from SMEs and business stakeholders to produce clear and accurate Technical Documents (HLD & LLD), incorporating both functional and non-functional needs.
• Deliver high-quality application and reporting solutions, ensuring application and data quality, security, and compliance is adhered to LPPI standard policies.
• Deliver robust, scalable, and high-performance technical solutions using modern technologies.
• Coordinate and communicate with internal stakeholders, including business analysts, project managers, external suppliers, as well as the end-users across the development lifecycle, to ensure that the project objectives, scope, schedule, budget, and quality are met.
• Conduct quality assurance to ensure developed solutions meet the functional and non-functional requirements as well as ensure adherence to best practices, coding standards, and quality guidelines.
• Prepare and maintain IT project documentation, code versioning, deployment and test artifacts.
• Manage risks, issues, and changes that may arise during the project lifecycle and escalate them to the appropriate level when necessary.
• Monitor and manage existing production services for high availability and resilience, with pro-active measures to improve overall service performance and providing production fixes.
• Follow ITIL principles to manage incidents, problems, and change requests.
• Work closely with Head of Business IT and Business Change Office function to ensure the successful deployment and transition of the IT solutions to the production environment.
• Provide expert guidance to IT peers across application and reporting technologies.
• Present information regularly to Head of Business IT, and Chief Information & Technology Officer as well as other internal department heads, demonstrating effective written and oral communication skills.

Requirements for the role

• A familiarity in Investment Management and/or Financial Services and working with business stakeholders in a cross-functional matrix environment.
• Understanding of modern applications, data and reporting solutions using Azure Cloud services, market products including but not limited to development of App Services with responsive UX, Web APIs, Service Bus, Agentic AI integration and Power BI reports (dashboards, Paginated, DAX queries), and power platform solutions.
• Development of applications solution using Entity Driven Development (EDD), Test Driven Development (TDD) with Mock objects, N-tier application layer, and REST APIs with data cache.
• Integration of Agentic AI and its APIs within Application Services.
• Azure DevOps to manage work items, code versioning, CI/CD pipelines, & deployment artifacts.
• Creating Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) flows, using modelling tools such as MS Visio.
• Excellent communication skills (written, verbal and presentation) and interpersonal.
• Must be able to understand and apply new technologies to stay current with best practices and trends in application and reporting architecture for financial services.
• Good analytical skills with the ability to present arguments to support and/or challenge a proposal.
• Work both independently and within a team-oriented, collaborative environment.
• Adept at conducting research into project-related issues and products.
• A proactive, self-motivated team player who can manage multiple workloads with deadlines and continually strive for improvements in quality, efficiency and presentation.
• Demonstrated experience and ability to work across multiple complex technical initiatives/projects, whilst consistently operating to a high standard.
• Technical understanding of the complexities of delivering change into an Investment Management organisation, specifically where application eco-system is decentralised.
• Understanding of the Azure Cloud Services, including Pro-Code and Low-Code Application development, Agentic AI Integration, Rest APIs, API Management, application databases design (relational, non-relational and vector db) and reporting services is essential.
• Reasonable adjustment will be made to working arrangements to accommodate a person with a disability who otherwise would be prevented from undertaking the work.