Lead AI Engineer

Salary: National (Edinburgh and Leeds) ranging from £72,100 to £108,000 and London from £79,300 to £120,000 per annum (salary offered will be based on skills and experience)

About the FCA and team

We regulate financial services firms in the UK, to keep financial markets fair, thriving and effective. By joining us, you’ll play a key part in protecting consumers, driving economic growth, and shaping the future of UK finance services.

The Data, Technology and Innovation (DTI) division enables the FCA to be a digital-first, data-led smart regulator by delivering a secure, agile, and cost-effective technology and data ecosystem that drives better decisions, transparency, and operational efficiency.

Working alongside the wider AI Programme, the department will partner with business leads to shape and deliver work in priority areas — Authorisations, SPC, EMO and Anti‐Money Laundering.

Role responsibilities

• Standardise and advance reusable AI solution patterns and reference architectures, improving cross-team consistency and delivery quality to enable more reliable and scalable product development.
• Establish end-to-end technical architectures for LLM-enabled systems, covering data pipelines, retrieval/RAG, prompt orchestration and agent workflows to support robust and effective AI implementation.
• Analyse complex constraints across product, data, security, legal and operations, translating them into clear standards and recommendations to enable delivery of highly complex AI solutions.
• Enhance CI/CD pipelines for AI systems, introducing automation, traceability and controlled release processes to ensure safe and repeatable deployments.
• Define monitoring, observability and operational strategies, improving visibility across quality, performance, safety, cost and reliability to support effective issue diagnosis and resolution.
• Set standards for prompt engineering, evaluation and testing, enhancing solution quality and behavioural consistency to support teams in resolving complex model challenges.
• Advance digital and data-driven methods by shaping organisational practices and innovation efforts that produce measurable improvements in performance and efficiency.
• Collaborate with senior stakeholders to deliver analytics-led solutions, addressing regulatory challenges and generating organisational impact to contribute to improved decision-making and long-term economic outcomes.

Skills required

Minimum:

• Extensive backend engineering experience building production services such as APIs and microservices with solid software engineering fundamentals combined with experience developing technical architecture and designs and taking them through enterprise review processes.
• Experience delivering cloud solutions on AWS including deploying, operating and troubleshooting services in live environments.
• Working knowledge of modern DevOps practices such as CI/CD, containerisation and monitoring with experience collaborating with engineers to deliver iteratively.

Essential:

• Solid backend engineering experience, with experience designing, building and running reliable services in production (performance, resilience and security).
• Direct experience building and operating solutions on AWS, including AWS AI services and the supporting platform services required for production delivery.
• AI engineering experience delivering LLM-enabled systems using LLM APIs/Bedrock, including RAG architectures, vector databases and orchestration frameworks.
• DevOps skills including CI/CD pipelines, containerisation and monitoring/observability, with experience defining release and operating practices for AI services.
• Experience Leading Engineering teams: providing technical guidance, aligning on standards/patterns, and adapting plans to resolve delivery and operational challenges.
• Demonstrable capability in prompt design and in setting evaluation/testing approaches for LLM solutions (quality, safety/guardrails and performance), including defining measurable success criteria.

Benefits

• 28 days annual leave plus bank holidays.
• Hybrid model where employees work a minimum of 40% in the office each month (expectation of 50% for senior leaders).
• Non-contributory pension (8–12% depending on age) and life assurance at eight times your salary.
• Private healthcare with Bupa, income protection, and 24/7 Employee Assistance.
• 35 hours of paid volunteering annually.
• A flexible benefits scheme designed around your lifestyle.

Our values & culture

Our colleagues are the key to our success as a regulator. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture: one that’s free from discrimination and bias, celebrates difference, and supports colleagues to deliver at their best.

If you require any adjustments due to a disability or condition, your recruiter is here to help - reach out for tailored support.

We welcome diverse working styles and aim to find flexible solutions that suit both the role and individual needs, including options like part-time and job sharing where applicable.

Disability Confident: our hiring approach

We’re proud to be a Disability Confident Employer, and therefore, people or individuals with disabilities and long-term conditions who best meet the minimum criteria for a role will go through to the next stage of the recruitment process.

Useful information and timeline

• Advert Closing: 02/06/26
• CV Review/Shortlist: 03/06/26
• First Stage Interviews: w/c 15/06/26
• Second Stage Interviews: w/c 22/06/26