AI Native Engineer - AI Enablement

At OakNorth, we’re building a bank for ambitious businesses, and we believe the next step-change in how we build software comes from AI-native engineering. The AI Enablement team exists to help product and engineering teams across the bank adopt AI practices and tools safely, effectively, and at scale, accelerating time-to-market while maintaining our high bar for quality, security, and reliability. This is a senior, hands-on engineering role for people who already build with AI as part of their daily workflow and want to help others do the same.

Team Mission 🚀

• The AI Enablement team multiplies impact across OakNorth primarily:

• As enablers, we partner with product and engineering teams to adopt AI practices and tools safely and effectively by building internal platforms, agents, and workflows that eliminate friction and accelerate delivery throughout the software development lifecycle.
• As builders, we experiment with and ship AI-native product features across OakNorth’s product portfolio. Proving what’s possible, establishing patterns, and moving fast without a long-term ownership burden.

In everything we do, we establish safe, governed, and scalable patterns for AI adoption across the bank. We learn fast and help others learn faster. Our success is measured by how effectively we accelerate software delivery across the organisation through AI-native ways of working.

The Role 👋

As a Senior AI-Native Engineer, you will design, build, and operate AI-powered systems that directly improve how software is developed and operated at OakNorth. At this level, you'll operate with significant autonomy, shape solutions end-to-end, and influence AI adoption across multiple teams.

You will:

• Build production-grade AI tools and agents
• Product ideation and discovery
• Technical specification review and early feedback
• Code generation, refactoring, and review
• Documentation generation and maintenance
• Test generation and quality validation
• Observability, log analysis, and incident support

Ship AI-native product features:

• Experiment with AI-powered capabilities across our product portfolio
• Move from concept to production quickly, proving what’s possible
• Establish reusable patterns and hand off to product teams for long-term ownership
• Balance rapid experimentation with production-quality delivery

Deliver AI-enabled workflows end-to-end:

• Agents that inspect logs and metrics to surface bugs, risks, or performance issues
• Automated pull requests with proposed fixes or improvements
• AI-assisted review of design documents and architectural decisions

Own initiatives from discovery to adoption: problem framing → solution design → implementation → rollout → measuring impact

Partner with product and engineering teams to embed AI tools into daily workflows, ensuring real adoption and measurable outcomes

Define standards and guardrails for AI usage in a regulated, security-conscious environment

Raise AI fluency across the organisation by sharing learnings, patterns, and examples that help others level up.

What We’re Looking For 🧠

• Strong engineering fundamentals
• 5+ years building and operating production systems
• Comfortable working full-stack or with deep expertise in backend/platform engineering
• Proven track record in designing and building systems used by other engineers
• Strong product mindset: you measure success by outcomes and adoption, not just output
• Skilled at rapid experimentation: you're comfortable with uncertainty, test ideas by shipping quick prototypes, and learn as much from failures as successes
• Skilled at breaking down ambiguous problems into practical, scalable solutions

Already AI-native:

• You’re already in the habit of:

• Using AI tools daily to accelerate your work (coding, debugging, reviews, documentation)
• Treating AI as a collaborator in your workflow, not a novelty
• Thinking in terms of agents, workflows, and automation
• Iterating quickly: experiment → learn → refine → scale

You’ve experienced firsthand how AI-native tools transform productivity, tools like Cursor, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Lovable, and others. What matters is a track record of quickly learning and integrating new AI tools into your workflow.

Nice to have

• Experience building or orchestrating AI agents or multi-step workflows
• Familiarity with LLM APIs, prompt engineering, or tool‑calling patterns
• Background integrating AI into CI/CD pipelines, observability, or developer tooling
• Experience working in regulated environments (financial services, security‑sensitive systems)

Technology 🧱

We’re pragmatic and evolving fast. Today, you’re likely to work with:

• 🐍 Python
• 🧠 LLMs & AI tooling (we're outcome‑driven and vendor‑agnostic)
• 🗄️ PostgreSQL, BigQuery
• 🎨 TypeScript, React
• 🔧 pytest, Jest, CI pipelines
• ☁️ AWS, GCP
• 🚀 Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions

More important than specific tools is your ability to learn fast, adapt, and choose the right abstraction.

How We Expect You to Work 👷♀️

• Enable, don’t block – you build platforms and tools that make other teams faster and more confident
• Outcome-driven – success is measured through adoption, time-to-market, and quality improvements
• Iterative by default – start small, validate value, then scale
• Hands‑on ownership – you build, ship, and operate what you create
• Collaborative – you work across squads, disciplines, and seniority levels
• Pragmatic about risk – especially when introducing AI into production and regulated systems

How We Expect You to Behave ❤️

• Curious, open, and generous with knowledge
• Strong opinions, held loosely
• Comfortable saying “this didn’t work, here’s what we learned”
• No ego, impact matters more than ownership
• Actively contribute to a psychologically safe, inclusive engineering environment

What Makes Working Here Better 😍

• This is a truly hybrid role, offering engineers the flexibility to work from home while also providing opportunities to collaborate in person with the team when it adds value. There’s no fixed requirement for days in the office, instead, we focus on creating space for engineers to engage meaningfully, whether that’s in-person for whiteboarding sessions or remote for deep focus work.
• Work‑life balance 🌴 - 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) each year, and enhanced family leave allowances.
• Competitive salary & equity 🏦 - We want people to have a serious stake in the business.
• Good kit 💻 - Your choice of the best laptop, running macOS.
• Team socials 🎉 - The opportunity to get to know each other outside of work.
• Company socials 🥡 - A chance to catch up and meet new colleagues weekly over informal office breakfasts, lunches and dinners on OakNorth – or at our free barista bar every day.
• Commuter support 🚲 - We offer the cycle to work and EV scheme.

About Us

We’re OakNorth Bank and we embolden entrepreneurs to realise their ambitions, understand their markets, and apply data intelligence to everyday decisions to scale successfully at pace. Banking should be barrier‑free. It’s a belief at our very core, inspired by our entrepreneurial spirit, driven by the unmet financial needs of millions, and delivered by our data‑driven tools. And for those who love helping businesses thrive? Our savings accounts help diversify the high street and create new jobs, all while earning savers some of the highest interest on the market. But we go beyond finance, to empower our people, encourage professional growth and create an environment where everyone can thrive. We strive to create an inclusive and diverse workplace where people can be themselves and succeed.

Our story

OakNorth Bank was built on the foundations of frustrations with old‑school banking. In 2005, when our founders tried to get capital for their data analytics company, the computer said ‘no’. Unfortunately, all major banks in the UK were using the same computer – and it was broken. Why was it so difficult for a profitable business with impressive cashflow, retained clients, and clear commercial success to get a loan? The industry was backward‑looking and too focused on historic financials, rather than future potential. So, what if there was a bank, founded by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs? One that offered a dramatically better borrowing experience for businesses? No more what ifs, OakNorth Bank exists.