AI Data Platform Lead in Manchester

Manchester UK, hybrid (60% office presence per year after onboarding period)

About RedCompass Labs: RedCompass Labs are payments experts focused exclusively on payments modernization. Over the last 23 years, RedCompass Labs has delivered 500+ projects across the world’s major payments schemes and platforms, including ISO 20022, SEPA, Swift, the Real-time Payments Network, and FedNow, ISO 20022 migrations, and FIS OPF, Finastra GPP, and ACI Worldwide. Its flagship Payments Expert Agent is an AI solution purpose-built for the full payments modernization software development lifecycle. Trained on decades of deep payments expertise and more than 30,000 curated documents, the agent is certified to SOC 2 Type II. RedCompass Labs supports clients from offices in London, Warsaw, Brussels, Miami, Boston, Toronto, and Pune.

Mission: Imagine reducing a 14-day financial analysis task to just 2 hours. At RedCompass Labs, we don't just imagine - we've built it. We're transforming the trillion-dollar payments industry through intelligent automation. At the heart of our mission is AnalystAccelerator.ai, our proprietary multi-agent AI platform built to accelerate complex analysis in global banking and compliance.

As a AI Data Platform Lead, you would:

• Own the data platform and evaluation capability that determine how good our AI products actually are.
• Own the ETL data platform that services and maintains our internal payments knowledgebase - ingestion, transformation, refresh, and quality.
• Ensure a steady flow of accurate, real-time data into our knowledge stores.
• Own AI agent and knowledge benchmarking - defining the strategy and building the implementation that measures agent and retrieval quality.
• Develop infrastructure strategy and implementation for AI product deployment.
• Develop observability of AI agent and knowledge usage - strategy and implementation.
• Own the strategy to productionise internally trained LLMs - taking models from research into deployable form.
• Lead our SRE and Observability team.

Candidate Profile: We’re seeking a hands-on technical leader who can set direction and build the thing themselves when it matters.

• Track record building and owning production data platforms - ETL/ELT at scale, not just pipeline contributions.
• Financial services experience, or experience with other highly regulated data sources.
• Experience with RAG and knowledge retrieval systems, including how retrieval quality is measured and improved.
• Hands-on with LLM and agent evaluation - benchmarking, eval harnesses, and regression testing of non-deterministic systems.
• Python experience, and comfortable in an Azure-native environment.
• Experience setting technical strategy and seeing it through to implementation - across data, infrastructure, and evaluation.
• Experience line managing a technical team, including DevOps or platform engineers, with the judgement to know when to delegate and when to go hands-on.
• Comfortable operating where the data is the product - you understand that knowledge quality determines whether the agent is trusted.

Bonus Qualifications:

• Background in financial services, payments, or another regulated domain.
• Experience productionising trained or fine-tuned models, including serving and monitoring.
• Experience with data platforms deployed into client-controlled environments.
• Data platform: Azure-native - Data Factory, Functions, storage, and orchestration tooling.
• Retrieval & knowledge: RAG systems, vector and hybrid search, Azure AI Search, MCP servers.
• Evaluation: benchmarking and eval frameworks for agent and retrieval quality.
• Core: Python, Docker, GitHub Actions / Azure DevOps.

What We Offer:

• Work with real purpose. At RedCompass Labs, your projects carry weight beyond the delivery plan. Our work sits at the intersection of global financial infrastructure and some of the most important crime-fighting efforts in the world.
• This is technical leadership with a genuine reason to care. A place where your judgement is trusted.
• A team that genuinely invests in its people. We are committed to your development - not just your output.
• A global community of specialists. With colleagues across London, Warsaw, Brussels, Toronto, Pune, and Miami, you will work alongside some of the sharpest minds in payments.

Contract of employment with RedCompass Labs includes the following competitive benefits package:

• Up to 10% of annual earnings as a personal performance bonus.
• Life insurance.
• Group Income Protection.
• Health Insurance for you and your family.
• Dental Insurance for you and your family.
• Pension: the pension is currently 4% employer and 4% employee. You also have the option to increase your contributions to your private pension, if you wish.
• 28 days annual holiday plus Public & Bank holidays.
• 7 days of sick leave paid 100% per annum.

RedCompass Labs is committed to promoting and supporting a diverse and inclusive workplace, ensuring fair and equitable treatment for all. This fuels innovation and enables us to work better together with each other and for our clients.