Artificial Intelligence Engineer in Southampton

SBS is seeking a skilled AI Engineer to join its Data & AI / Engineering organization in the UK or EU. This role will focus on designing, building, and deploying AI-driven solutions that enhance SBS products and client offerings. The ideal candidate will combine strong software engineering fundamentals with applied AI/ML expertise, enabling the development of scalable, production-grade AI systems in a regulated financial services environment.

Location: UK or EU

Hybrid/Remote: Remote (Occasional travel required)

Responsibilities:

• AI Solution Development
  • Design, build, and deploy AI/ML models and intelligent applications across SBS platforms
  • Develop solutions leveraging: Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative AI (GenAI / LLMs)
  • Translate business requirements into technical AI solutions that deliver measurable impact
• Model Deployment & MLOps
  • Implement and manage end-to-end ML pipelines, from data ingestion to model deployment and monitoring
  • Collaborate with DevOps and engineering teams to ensure scalable, reliable production deployment
  • Maintain and optimize model performance, accuracy, and efficiency over time
• Product Integration
  • Integrate AI capabilities into core banking, payments, and digital platforms
  • Work closely with Product Managers, Architects, and Developers to embed AI into customer-facing solutions
  • Support API development and microservices architecture for AI-driven features
• Data Engineering Collaboration
  • Partner with data engineers to ensure data quality, availability, and pipeline integrity
  • Work with structured and unstructured datasets across large-scale, distributed systems
• Innovation & Continuous Improvement
  • Stay current with advancements in AI, GenAI, and emerging technologies
  • Contribute to experimentation, prototyping, and innovation initiatives
  • Identify opportunities to improve automation, efficiency, and decision-making through AI

Qualifications:

• Software Architecture & Design
  • Application architecture: Strong grasp of clean/hexagonal architecture, dependency injection, SOLID principles, and protocol-based interfaces.
  • API design: Experience designing and maintaining RESTful API contracts.
  • System design: Distributed systems thinking — understands event-driven patterns, asynchronous communication, eventual consistency, and the trade-offs of different integration approaches.
  • Data modeling: Can design domain models, define data flows between system components, and make pragmatic schema design decisions.
• AI & LLM Application Skills
  • LLM application development: Hands-on experience building production applications powered by LLMs.
  • Model-agnostic design: This is a sovereign AI system.
  • Agentic system design: Demonstrated experience designing multi-step AI systems where the model makes decisions about what to do next.
  • Prompt engineering depth: Can demonstrate iterative prompt development for complex tasks.
• Python Engineering
  • Production Python: Strong async Python with FastAPI or equivalent framework.
  • Safeguards for hallucinated tools, loops, partial completion, and unsafe actions.
• Engineering Qualities
  • Works within existing systems: The candidate joins a substantial existing codebase and architecture.
  • Production mindset: Thinks about error handling, retry logic, graceful degradation, observability, and security as first-class concerns.
  • Clear communicator: Can explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.

Company Overview: At SBS, we’re more than just a technology company; we’re a global fintech partner helping banks and financial institutions transform, innovate, and grow. Our focus is on delivering long-term value, leveraging cutting-edge technology, and fostering strong client partnerships.

Why SBS? At SBS, we’re committed to supporting our employees in every aspect of their lives, from health and wellbeing to financial security and lifestyle perks. We offer benefits that help you thrive at work and beyond.

Equal Opportunity Employer: We are committed to providing equal opportunities and ensuring a fair and inclusive recruitment process.