AI Specialist; AI Foundry

We are looking for an experienced AI Specialist (AI Foundry) with Function Data & AI 10+ years of experience to take end-to-end ownership.

• Translate complex concepts into clear guidance for executives and governance forums.
• Contribute to AI strategy, roadmap and horizon‑scanning, informing investment and risk posture.
• Provide insight to support business cases, investment decisions, risk assessments, and prioritization discussions at AI governance forums.
• Lead enterprise‑wide assurance for high‑risk AI systems, conducting deep reviews, assessing model and agent behaviour under stress conditions, identifying systemic risks, and recommending design‑level mitigations to ensure solutions remain robust, ethical and compliant.
• Serve as the subject matter expert on AI technologies, including large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI, providing insights and recommendations to support business cases and investment decisions.
• Lead exploration and proof‑of‑concepts for multi‑agent, tool‑using and semi‑autonomous workflows.
• Define enterprise AI patterns for orchestration, prompt governance, vector search, memory and agent frameworks.
• Act as a key influencer and advisor to senior management and governance forums, providing expert guidance on AI-related decisions and strategies.
• Advise on model selection, prompting strategies, data approaches and trade‑offs for safe, high‑performing solutions.
• Mentor and develop AI capabilities within the organization, uplifting the skills and expertise of delivery resources and ensuring the successful implementation of AI initiatives
• Shape and govern agentic AI patterns (memory, planning, tool use, autonomy constraints, escalation).
• Guide RAG implementations, vector databases, embedding pipelines and content governance models.
• Ensure strong data foundations (quality, lineage, metadata, privacy, access controls) for AI workloads.
• Drive cross‑functional technical AI enablement by developing advanced tooling, accelerators and evaluation frameworks, enabling teams to experiment safely, adopt best‑practice AI patterns, and scale AI delivery with higher consistency and lower technical debt.
• Provide robust technical challenge of vendors and models with evidence, benchmarking and risk assessment.
• Define standards, guardrails, and reusable frameworks for Copilot/LLM/agentic solutions.
• Support delivery of high‑risk/novel initiatives as a deep technical contributor and escalation point.
• Mentor delivery resources to uplift AI capability.
• Managing escalations and deputising for Senior Manager where required, and supporting the wider Data & AI Leadership team.
• Translate Divisional priorities into plans and deliverables to deliver overall Group strategic priorities.
• Build the capability & capacity of functional resources to drive sustained commercial success.
• Interpret & communicate the priorities for the Function, motivating and developing a high performing team.
• Own functional priorities, applying specialist expertise to put the customer at the heart of everything and drive a profitable business.
• Initiate and develop critical external and internal relationships which create value, collaborating to deliver commercial and customer priorities.
• Role model YBS Values, champion diversity and challenge behavior contrary to the Values
• Identify, define & oversee management of risks associated with delivery across YBS.
• Uphold corporate legal & regulatory responsibilities.
• Implement and manage transformation activity & harness innovation to create a high performing & sustainable business.

• Higher education qualification (or equivalent experience) in Ethics, Law, Risk Management, Social Sciences, Data/Computer Science or relevant field
• Proven experience applying deep technical expertise across AI, ML, LLMs, agentic AI, and applied AI engineering, driving the design, evaluation, and governance of advanced AI solutions
• Proven experience designing, evaluating and governing multi‑agent systems, incorporating memory structures, tool‑use orchestration, planning algorithms and autonomy controls.
• Demonstrated ability to benchmark LLM performance, evaluate model choices, run structured behavioural…