Senior AI/ML Scientist – LLM Specialist in Southampton

About the Business

Quilter plc is a leading wealth management business, helping to enable brighter financial futures for every generation.

Quilter oversees £126.3 billion in customer investments (as of August 2025). It has an adviser and customer offering spanning financial advice, investment platforms, multi-asset investment solutions, and discretionary fund management. The business is comprised of two segments: Affluent and High Net Worth.

Affluent encompasses the financial planning business, Quilter Financial Planning, the Quilter Investment Platform and Quilter Investors, the multi-asset investment solutions business.

High Net Worth includes the discretionary fund management business, Quilter Cheviot, together with Quilter Cheviot Financial Planning – offering a highly personalised service to private clients, charities, trustees, and professional partners. Quilter Cheviot has presence throughout the UK, Ireland and Channel Islands.

At Quilter we never stand still. Our foundations are rooted in our extraordinary expertise, which is trusted by hundreds of thousands of customers, but we have great ambitions to stay one step ahead and make an even greater difference to the people and communities we serve, including our colleagues.

Our business is transforming, continually modernising, and becoming even more customer centric. So, if you want to be bold in the pursuit of your ambitions, bring new ideas, and challenge and evolve what we do, it’s the perfect time to join us!

About the Role

Level : 5

Department: COO

Location : Southampton or London

Contract type : Permanent

The new role sits within Chief Operating Office (COO) and reports Head of AI & Data Science. The key accountabilities for the role are as follows:

• AI/ML Solution Delivery: Hands on end-to-end development and deployment of both traditional and GenAI-based machine learning models, including discovery analytics, experimental design, model development, benchmarking, enhancement and deployment.
• LLM & RAG Integration: Design and implement new Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and enhance existing frameworks, applying advanced techniques in data chunking/splitting, vectorization, knowledge graph representation (GraphRAG), and query retrieval and evaluation.
• Model Evaluation & Prompt Engineering: Design and execute experiments to benchmark and evaluate model performance using both classical metrics (precision, recall, F-score) and GenAI-specific techniques (LLM-as-a-Judge, ROUGE, GANs). Develop and refine prompts to optimize GenAI model reasoning, accuracy, and overall effectiveness.
• Responsible AI: Apply strong understanding of ethical AI principles and governance frameworks, ensuring robust model validation and compliance with regulatory and organizational standards.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with business partners, stakeholders, and technical teams (data engineering, platform engineering) to translate business requirements into impactful AI solutions.
• Research & Innovation: Stay abreast of emerging tools, techniques, and best practices in LLMs, RAG, GenAI, model development & evaluation techniques and proactively apply new knowledge to drive innovation.

About You

Knowledge

• Strong foundation in core machine learning algorithms and deep learning concepts (e.g., Neural Nets, CNNs, GANs, RNNs, Transformers).
• In-depth understanding of natural language processing (NLP) model development and large language model (LLM) fine‑tuning, evaluation and RAG integration (Eg: BERT, GPT, Claude, LLaMA, Mistral).
• Deep understanding of prompt engineering techniques, including zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting strategies with ability to enhance the performance of LLMs and agentic AI systems.
• Solid grasp of data structures and handling for both structured (SQL, pandas) and unstructured (text, images, audio) data, including knowledge‑base creation with Graph (Neo4j) and vector stores.
• Awareness of AI governance, and regulatory considerations, especially in financial services.

Experience

• Proven track record in building, fine‑tuning, and evaluating traditional ML, NLP and LLM‑based models.
• Hands‑on experience with leading ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow) and LLM libraries (e.g., Hugging Face, LangChain/LangGraph, LlamaIndex).
• Experience in RAG and/or GraphRAG pipeline development and evaluation combining with chunking, vectorization (vector store and/or knowledge graph) and enhanced retriever‑reranker techniques.
• Deep expertise in model evaluation framework and performance analysis (Confusion Matrix, Recall, Precision, MAP, NDCG, LLM‑as‑a‑Judge, ROUGE, BLEU, faithfulness, hallucination detection).
• Developing and deploying scalable models on cloud platforms (Databricks, Azure, Mosaic AI, AWS, SageMaker) and using tools such as FastAPI and Docker.
• Background in financial services or other regulated industries is highly desirable.

Skills

• Advanced programming skills in Python (and optionally, other languages such as R or Java).
• Strong data engineering and data wrangling abilities for both structured and unstructured data.
• Expertise in model development, evaluation, benchmarking, and continuous improvement.
• Effective communication skills for presenting complex technical concepts to non‑technical audiences.
• Problem‑solving mindset, curiosity, and a passion for staying up to date with the latest advancements.
• Ability to document work clearly and adhere to best practices in reproducibility and model governance.

Qualifications

• PhD or MSc in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Science or a related STEM field.

Inclusion & Diversity

We value diversity and strive to promote inclusivity in all aspects of our culture. We believe in equal opportunities for all, ensuring that no applicant encounters less favourable treatment based on anything but their skills, qualifications, experience, and potential. We celebrate the unique contributions of a diverse workforce and create a respectful, nurturing environment where every colleague can thrive.

Values

Do the right thing: We act with integrity and are proudly committed to going above and beyond in service of our clients and the support we provide our communities.
Always curious: We continuously seek new ideas and knowledge so we’re one step ahead of our clients’ needs. We look for inspiration everywhere and encourage experimentation, recognising that this is how we create brilliant solutions for brighter futures.
Embrace challenge: We aim high to transform our potential into meaningful outcomes. With ambition as our driving force and a steadfast commitment to growth, we succeed for the good of every generation.
Stronger together: Combining our diverse talents, we accomplish more collectively than we ever could do alone. We speak openly, actively listen, and support each other, and constructively challenge and embrace new ideas. We seek empowerment and demonstrate ownership and trust, with the confidence to make impactful decisions.

Core Benefits

Holiday: 182 hours (26 days)

Quilter Incentive Scheme: All employees are eligible to participate in incentive scheme, to incentivise business performance and their contribution.

Pension Scheme: A non‑contributory company pension scheme that can be boosted through personal contributions.

Private Medical Insurance: Single cover as standard with options to increase cover to include your partner or children.

Life Assurance: 4x your salary.

Income Protection: 75% of salary, less state benefits, payable after 26 weeks of absence.

Healthcare Cash Plan: Jersey employees only

In addition to our core benefits, we offer a range of flexible benefits to UK employees that you can choose from and pay for conveniently via a salary deduction.