Head of AI - Agentic AI - Payments - Banking

Head of AI - Agentic AI - Payments - Banking

Excellent opportunity opens for a Head of AI to take complete ownership of AI powered products created for Tier 1 banks. This is a hands on role where you will design and deploy an Agentic AI tool, tailoring the solution to the bank.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Leadership:

• Define and own the company's AI strategy, aligning it with broader business and product objectives
• Act as the internal authority on AI, advising the executive team on emerging trends, risks, and opportunities — particularly within the payments and financial services landscape
• Build and maintain relationships with key external partners, vendors, and the wider AI research community
• Represent the company at industry events and contribute to thought leadership

Technical Delivery

• Lead hands-on delivery of AI and ML projects, from prototyping through to production deployment
• Architect robust, scalable AI systems within a payments environment, with strong awareness of latency, reliability, and compliance requirements
• Drive adoption of best practices in model development, evaluation, monitoring, and governance
• Stay current with the latest developments in LLMs, predictive modelling, agentic AI, and applied ML

People & Team

• Lead, mentor, and grow a small team of AI/ML engineers
• Foster a culture of curiosity, rigour, and pragmatism — shipping things that work, not just things that are clever
• Partner closely with Engineering, Product, Ops and Compliance teams to embed AI thinking across the organisation
• Play an active role in hiring and building out the team as the function scales

Ideal Candidate:

Essential

• Proven experience leading AI/ML initiatives at a senior level, ideally within fintech, payments, or financial services
• Strong hands-on technical background — proficient in Python and comfortable working directly with ML frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn) and LLM tooling
• Experience deploying and maintaining ML models in production environments at scale
• Track record of translating complex AI concepts into clear business strategy and measurable outcomes
• Experience managing or mentoring technical teams
• Deep understanding of data infrastructure, MLOps, and the full ML lifecycle
• Strong communicator with the ability to engage both technical peers and non-technical executives

Desirable

• Experience in payments, fraud, credit risk, or adjacent regulated financial domains
• Familiarity with UK/EU regulatory frameworks relevant to AI in financial services
• Experience with real-time inference systems and low-latency ML pipelines
• Exposure to agentic AI frameworks and LLM-based product development
• Published work, open-source contributions, or public speaking in the AI/ML space

Interested? Please Apply!

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