AI Lead

Responsible AI Lead

Location: Manchester, United Kingdom

Salary: £90,440 – £110,000 per annum

Working pattern: Hybrid – at least 2 days per week in the Manchester office (40% of time)

Hours: Full‑time, 35 hours per week

End date: Thursday 15 January 2026

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. This is a technical team lead role combining technical depth with people leadership.

As a senior leader in the lab 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. Your expertise will drive innovation, set engineering standards, and influence the strategic direction of cutting‑edge solutions.

Developing the upcoming era of autonomous AI for colleagues and customers is our focus—ensuring safety, security, and scalability. As a Responsible AI Lead, you’ll set technical direction and lead multiple teams to design, build and run AI Agents on Google Cloud, blending open‑source tools with GCP native services. You’ll stay hands‑on when needed and help grow engineering capability while delivering outcomes at pace in a regulated environment.

• Define strategy and technical direction for agentic AI services (patterns, standards, runtime quality), 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 (including Agent Builder), Cloud Run/GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud
  
  SQL, Big Query, 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 Fin Ops.
• 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 Type Script, with experience delivering production services (APIs, event‑driven systems, microservices), ideally 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 optimisation 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, with the ability to simplify complex concepts into clear, outcome‑focused narratives.

• Experience with Vertex AI Agent Builder/Agentspace, Lang Graph, 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.

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• An annual bonus award, subject to Group performance
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top
• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous…