AI Architect
Senior AI Architect - Financial Services
London, UK (Hybrid Working Model)
Initial 6-Month Engagement
£650-£700 per day (Inside IR35)
The Opportunity
Our client, a leading organisation within the financial services sector, is undertaking a major strategic transformation to embed Artificial Intelligence across the enterprise at scale. This initiative is focused not only on innovation but on building robust, production-ready AI capabilities that deliver consistent and measurable business value.
They are seeking a Senior AI Architect to play a pivotal role in defining, delivering, and-critically-driving the adoption of enterprise-grade AI solutions across the organisation. This is a high-impact leadership position requiring both deep technical expertise and strong stakeholder engagement capabilities.
This mandate moves beyond experimentation and proof-of-concept work. The organisation is specifically looking for a leader who can translate AI ambition into live, trusted, and widely adopted solutions used across the business. Success in this role will depend on the ability to ensure that AI initiatives move into production environments and generate tangible outcomes.
A key focus is addressing a common industry challenge: transitioning AI initiatives from proof-of-concept into scalable, operational, value-generating products that are trusted and actively used.
Key Responsibilities
AI Strategy and Architecture
Define and lead the end-to-end AI architecture across the organisation, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Large Language Model integration and orchestration, and agent-based workflows and applications. Establish scalable, secure, and reusable design patterns aligned with enterprise standards and governance frameworks.
Product-Focused Delivery
Lead the delivery of production-ready AI solutions that move beyond pilots and governance bottlenecks. Ensure deployment into live environments with clear adoption strategies in place. Embed a product-centric mindset focused on ownership, usability, and measurable value realisation across the business.
AI Platform Engineering
Oversee the design and implementation of advanced AI capabilities, including RAG pipelines integrating enterprise data sources such as Teams and SharePoint, agent-driven applications interfacing with internal and legacy systems, and text-to-SQL solutions enabling natural language interaction with enterprise datasets. Enable robust deployment through CI/CD-integrated pipelines and automated workflows using platforms such as Databricks.
Technology Leadership within Microsoft Ecosystem
Operate within a Microsoft-centric technology landscape, including Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Azure Databricks, Azure AI Foundry, and Microsoft Fabric. Define and enforce integration standards across AI, data, and enterprise platforms, ensuring alignment with broader technology strategies.
Adoption, Influence, and Investment
Act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership and C-suite stakeholders. Clearly articulate the value of AI across commercial impact, operational efficiency, and risk mitigation. Drive enterprise adoption, build confidence in AI solutions, influence stakeholders to unlock investment, and navigate resistance to AI adoption within complex organisational environments.
Governance and Risk Management
Ensure all AI solutions comply with financial services regulations, including data privacy, security, model governance, and auditability. Address bias mitigation and explainability requirements, ensuring solutions are suitable for sensitive use cases such as credit risk, regulatory reporting, and financial data services.
Candidate Profile
Sector Expertise
Demonstrated experience within banking or regulated financial services environments, with strong understanding of regulatory, risk, and governance frameworks.
AI and Engineering Capability
Proven track record delivering production AI systems, including RAG-based knowledge platforms, natural language data access solutions such as text-to-SQL, and AI-powered assistants or agent frameworks. Experience developing pipelines for ingesting enterprise content into vector databases and building agent-based front ends for interacting with internal systems is essential.
Technical Expertise
Hands-on experience across Azure AI services, CI/CD-driven development, API-led architectures, and distributed systems is required.
Leadership and Influence
Excellent communication skills with the ability to engage senior stakeholders, translate technical concepts into business outcomes, and drive adoption of AI solutions across the organisation.
Why This Role
This is a rare opportunity to shape how AI is operationalised at scale within a leading financial institution. The successful candidate will combine technical depth, delivery credibility, and executive influence to ensure AI becomes a core, trusted capability embedded within the business.
We welcome conversations with individuals who have successfully delivered AI solutions that are robust, adopted, and delivering measurable value across enterprise environments.