Senior Technical Lead - Conversational Chatbot

Business Unit: Product & Channels

Salary range: £72,800 to £91,000 - DOE

Location: UK hybrid – with travel to one of our UK Virgin Money hubs when required

Contract type: Permanent

Our Team

The Product & Channels CIO mission is clear: combine engineering excellence, top-tier delivery practices, and outstanding service design to create superb products and services. We are on a journey to become the UK’s best digital bank, focusing on digital customer journeys, engineering excellence, and empowering our people. The Product & Channels team leads client-facing apps and web services, including the migration to a single V-App. We are transforming to enhance collaboration, encourage curiosity, and streamline operations for exceptional customer experiences. With a purpose-driven approach, we are making money happier for our customers, ensuring better security, stability, and performance. We are also responsible for driving and transforming our contact centre and stores (branch) application estate.

What you’ll be doing

• Reporting to the Engineering Lead, you will be responsible for line managing a team of talented Engineers and providing direction for the capabilities being built by them. This includes recruitment activities, management of team financials, and ensuring delivery is done using approved tools and technologies.
• Build and maintain Conversational ChatBot delivery roadmap working with the business stakeholders whilst also ensuring continued focus on Platform Health and stabilisation and building secure, resilient and observant platforms.
• Lead and drive end-to-end software delivery ensuring business expectations on delivery and code quality are met.
• Drive continuous improvements and improve ways of working including collaboration with relevant areas (e.g. DevOps, Release Management, QA) to enable faster release and deployment cycles.
• Responsible for Supplier Relationship Management tasks for our relationship with Microsoft and maintaining strong relationships with Operations teams and our delivery partners.
• Work with architecture team to design solutions that are secure, scalable and optimised for performance.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to team members including taking part in design and code reviews, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement.

We need you to have

• Experience in a technical lead role, leading the delivery of large and complex projects and leading the team of engineers.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to a non-technical audience.
• Strong working knowledge of Azure Language Understanding (ALU) and Conversational Language Understanding (CLU) for building domain-specific, multi-turn dialog systems.
• Proficient in Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents) to build low-code copilots that use Dataverse, Power Automate, and Azure Cognitive Services (e.g., LUIS, QnA Maker, Translator, Speech-to-Text).
• Extensive experience in Advanced Conversational AI & Copilot Integration.
• Deep technical expertise in designing, developing, and deploying enterprise-grade conversational bots using Microsoft Bot Framework SDK, Azure Bot Services, and Azure OpenAI (GPT-4, embeddings).
• Experience of working in an Agile environment and will champion ongoing improvements to ways of working.
• Strong Engineering skills but also a background in Solution/Architectural Design.

It’s a bonus if you have but not essential

• Microsoft certification: PL-600: Power Platform Solution Architect
• Microsoft certification: PL-200: Power Platform Functional Consultant

Red Hot Rewards

• Generous holidays - 38.5 days annual leave (including bank holidays and prorated if part-time) plus the option to buy more.
• Up to five extra paid well-being days per year.
• 20 weeks paid, gender-neutral family leave (52 weeks in total) for expectant parents and those looking to adopt.
• Market-leading pension.
• Free private medical cover, income protection and life assurance.
• Flexible benefits include Cycle to Work, wellness and health assessments, and critical illness. And there’s no waiting around, you’ll enjoy these benefits from day one.

Feeling insatiably curious about this role? If we’re lucky to receive a lot of interest, we may close the advert early and would hate you to miss out. We’re all about helping you Live a Life More Virgin, so happy to talk flexible working with you.

Say hello to Virgin Money

We’re making great strides towards achieving our ambition of becoming the UK’s best digital bank. As a full-service digital bank with a heritage stretching back over 180 years, we are a workforce to be reckoned with. We’re putting the full power of our experience behind disruptive ideas that reinvent the role a bank plays in people’s lives. We’re customer obsessed and work tirelessly to create positive experiences for our millions of customers and deliver on our purpose, ‘Making You Happier About Money.’ Our customer centric culture means that we are able to do banking differently and by innovating and working together we can make a real difference. Join us and Live a Life More Virgin that empowers you with choice and flexibility in how you work.

Be yourself at Virgin Money

Our purpose is to make people happier about money, this means seeing and feeling the world as our customers do by creating a workforce that reflects the rich diversity of our customers and communities. We’re committed to creating an inclusive culture where colleagues feel safe and inspired to contribute, speak up and be heard. As a Disability Confident Leader, we’re committed to removing any obstacles to inclusion. If you need any reasonable adjustments or support making your application, contact our Talent Acquisition team.

Now the legal bit

Living A Life More Virgin allows our colleagues to be based anywhere in the UK (if the role allows it), but we’ll need you to confirm you have the right to work in the UK. If you’re successful in securing a role with us, there are some checks you need to complete before starting. These include credit and criminal record checks and three years’ worth of satisfactory references. If the role is part of the Senior Manager Regime and Certification Regime, it requires enhanced pre-employment checks – we’ll ask for six years of regulatory references, and once in the role, you’ll be subject to periodic employment checks.

Advert close date is 26th May 2025.