AI Engineering Lead

The Opportunity

Shawbrook provides finance to a wide range of customer segments that value the premium experience, flexibility and certainly we deliver. We are a purpose-led organisation, with a focus on delivering long-term sustainable value for all our stakeholders.

We have a diversified offering, with our innovative lending propositions tailored to meet specific customer needs in carefully selected markets across SME, Real Estate and Personal. Our products range from complex structured credit facilities for growth-focused businesses to mortgages for professional landlords and property investors, as well as simple loans for consumers delivered digitally. We fuel our lending through customer deposits, which we attract by delivering a premium experience, choice and consistently great value to smart savers.

The business model we have created is unique and difficult to replicate, with our ‘best of both’ approach combining deep human expertise with advanced digital, tech and data capabilities. This combination not only allows us to deliver excellent customer experiences, but to do so efficiently and at scale. We are proud of our innovative and agile culture, which drives consistently high employee engagement scores and makes Shawbrook an attractive destination for the best talent. If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves, contribute new ideas and believe anything is possible, you’re our kind of person.

Work with us because you:

• Want to be part of a bank built for the dynamics of the modern world

• Relish a challenge and enjoy a fast-paced, innovative and hardworking culture

• Enjoy finding new and better ways to solve complexity and make things happen

• Want to belong to a diverse culture that stands shoulder to shoulder with minority and underrepresented groups

• Care about society and the environment and want to be part of a business that cares too

• Want to continue to grow professionally and be the best version of yourself

The Role & Responsibilities

We are seeking an experienced AI Engineering Lead to lead our AI Engineering squad as we scale our in-house artificial intelligence capability across Shawbrook Bank.

This role joins us at a pivotal stage of our AI transformation and provides a unique opportunity to shape our engineering standards, tooling, governance, and delivery model. This is an exciting and transformative time for Shawbrook as we accelerate moving from experimentation and proof-of-concept initiatives into production-grade AI systems that deliver measurable business value across lending, deposits, operations, risk, and customer experience. This role will play a crucial part in embedding scalable, secure, and value-driven AI capabilities across the Bank.

Working in close partnership with the AI Product Manager, you will lead a multidisciplinary squad of AI Engineers and Data Scientists to design, build, deploy, and operate robust, secure, and compliant AI solutions within a regulated banking environment.

With a strong background in AI/ML engineering within agile delivery teams, you will be comfortable architecting end-to-end AI systems — from experimentation and model development through to MLOps, monitoring, and production deployment. You will combine strategic thinking with hands-on technical leadership, remaining close to the code while guiding your team through best practices in software engineering, data engineering, and responsible AI.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical direction and engineering leadership for the AI Engineering squad, setting standards for high-quality, production-grade AI solutions.

• Partner closely with the AI Product Manager to translate business priorities into technical roadmaps, delivery plans, and scalable architectures.

• Lead the design and implementation of end-to-end AI systems, from data pipelines and model development through to deployment and monitoring.

• Establish and evolve best practices for AI engineering, including MLOps, CI/CD, testing, observability, and model lifecycle management.

• Ensure AI solutions meet non-functional requirements including security, performance, scalability, resilience, and regulatory compliance.

• Embed responsible AI principles, including explainability, fairness, bias monitoring, and appropriate model governance controls.

• Remain hands-on where required, supporting complex technical challenges, reviewing code, and guiding architectural decisions.

• Manage, mentor, and develop AI Engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.

• Contribute to recruitment, workforce planning, and capability development within the AI Engineering function.

• Define and track engineering metrics to measure system reliability, model performance, and business impact, driving ongoing optimisation.

The Person

Qualifications

• AI/ML Engineering Experience – Significant experience designing, building, and deploying machine learning and AI (specifically agentic generative AI) solutions in production environments, with particular focus on scalable, cloud-native architectures (preferably Azure) within microservices-based ecosystems.

• MLOps & Deployment Frameworks – Experience implementing and maintaining MLOps frameworks and tooling in Azure (preferred) and AWS (beneficial) environments, covering the full model lifecycle including experimentation, versioning, CI/CD, deployment, monitoring, and retraining strategies.

• Design, develop, and maintain production - grade ML pipelines and services using Python and relevant frameworks (e.g. MLflow, Azure ML, Databricks, FastAPI, TensorFlow, PyTorch, or similar).

• Data & Platform Engineering – Strong understanding of data engineering principles, including feature engineering, data pipelines, API integration, and working with structured and unstructured datasets in secure, regulated environments.

• Leadership Skills – A motivational leader of people with the ability to mentor and guide AI Engineers and Data Scientists, delegate effectively, and provide constructive technical and performance feedback to team members.

• Architecture & Engineering Standards – Experience defining engineering standards, architectural patterns, and best practices for scalable, secure, and maintainable AI systems.

• Responsible AI & Governance – Understanding of model risk management, explainability, bias mitigation, validation, and documentation requirements, particularly within regulated financial services environments.

• Process Improvement – The ability to assess and evolve engineering processes, tooling, and delivery models to better suit the changing needs of the team and business.

• Agile Delivery – Experience working within agile, cross-functional delivery teams to ensure AI solutions are delivered iteratively, reliably, and aligned to business value.

• Relevant academic background in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related discipline. Professional certifications in cloud platforms (e.g., Azure AI Engineer Associate) would be beneficial.

Reward

Your Wellbeing - We take your health and well-being very seriously by providing a range of benefits to give you and your family peace of mind. These include:

• Market leading family friendly policies such as access to our Maternity, Adoption and Paternity policies from Day 1 of your employment

• Free access to Headspace, a mindfulness & meditation digital health app

• Free access to Peppy digital health app that offers personalised support through fertility treatment becoming a parent or menopause

• EAP (Employee Assistance Programme) - Offering you support on a wide range of subjects including financial concerns, mental wellbeing and more general queries around family, work, housing and health

• Cycle to work scheme

• Discounts on gym membership

• Contributory pension scheme & death in service

Your Lifestyle - It’s important you strike the right balance between your work and personal life. We provide benefits to support you when at work and when you’re enjoying your leisure time.

• Minimum of 25 days holiday per year

• Option to buy or sell holiday days through our flexi-holiday scheme

• Discounts on gym membership nationwide

• Access to discounts on a range of high street and online brands

• Community support and charitable giving

Your Contribution - We’re focused on rewarding those that go the extra mile in helping us achieve our goals.

• Participation in our annual discretionary bonus scheme designed to reward your contribution to our success

• Proudly Shawbrook recognition scheme focused on recognising our role models and thanking our colleagues for a job well done