Responsible AI Lead

Responsible AI Lead

Salary: £90,440 - £110,000 per annum

Location: Manchester

Hours: Full-time – 35 hours

Working Pattern: Hybrid – at least two days per week, or 40% of time at our office.

• Hybrid Working – at least two days per week, or 40% of time at office.
• Job Share

Exciting opportunity for a hands‐on Responsible AI Lead to join our Voice, Workforce Intelligence Lab. You’ll lead a cross‐functional team to build and evolve our telephony and digital platforms, combining technical depth with people leadership. As a senior leader, you will provide technical leadership in shaping and delivering next‐generation capabilities – integrating advanced software engineering practices with Language Models and Generative AI within a cloud‐native architecture.

• Define strategy and technical direction for agentic AI services (patterns, standards, runtime quality) while working closely with Engineering peers, Product & Architecture teams.
• Lead, develop and coach multiple teams, fostering a high‐performance and inclusive engineering culture.
• Design and deliver AI Agents using services such as Vertex AI, Cloud Run/GKE, Pub/Sub, CloudSQL, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Secret Manager, and IAM, integrating securely with enterprise systems.
• Achieve efficiency with quality: CI/CD, automated testing (unit, contract, end‐to‐end), performance testing, SRE practices, and actionable observability (logs, metrics, traces).
• Engineer for safety, security and cost‐effectiveness by implementing guardrails, supervising model/agent evaluations, secrets management, IAM scoping, and FinOps.
• Lead the full lifecycle (design, build, run, iterate) ensuring resilience, scalability and operability.
• Influence and lead others in the platform by providing reusable components, patterns, and templates, leading vendor interactions, streamlining the tech infrastructure, and communicating effectively with senior collaborators.

• Proficiency in Java, Python, and TypeScript, with experience delivering production services (APIs, event‐driven systems, microservices) on GCP.
• Proven technical leadership of large, multi‐team deliveries – setting strategy, making sound architectural decisions, and enabling teams to deliver at pace.
• Hands‐on experience with agentic AI: building LLM‐powered applications/agents, tool use, orchestration, retrieval (RAG), prompt and safety engineering, evaluation and telemetry.
• Proficient knowledge of cloud‐native engineering: containers (GKE/Cloud Run), Terraform/IaC, CI/CD, automated quality assurance, observability, performance optimization, and incident management.
• Solid knowledge of security, privacy and compliance in regulated environments; confident working with Risk, Security and Legal teams.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills, simplifying complex concepts into clear, outcome‐focused narratives.

• Experience with Vertex AI Agent Builder/Agentspace, LangGraph, multi‐agent patterns or agent‐to‐agent protocols.
• Knowledge of data governance and model risk practices in financial services.
• Exposure to Azure/AWS or cross‐cloud patterns.
• Experience building communities of practice and engineering guilds.

We’re an inclusive organisation that values diversity and strives to build a workplace reflecting modern society. We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture. We’re disability confident and welcome reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes.

• Generous pension contribution up to 15%.
• Annual bonus award subject to Group performance.
• Share schemes, including free shares.
• Flexible benefits to adapt to lifestyle (discounted shopping).
• 30 days holiday plus bank holidays.
• Wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies.

End date: Thursday 30 July 2026.