Principal Lead, AI Platform & Solutions

About Us

First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) is the largest bank in the UAE and one of the world's largest and safest financial institutions. We offer a comprehensive range of personal and private banking services, including credit cards, Islamic banking, investments, loans, and mortgages. Our commitment to excellence and innovation drives us to provide top-tier financial solutions to our clients.

Working at FAB means being part of a team of talented and passionate individuals with a shared vision to support the ambitions of our stakeholders to  Grow Stronger.  We embrace the needs of our customers across the globe with a sense of responsibility and confidence driven by extensive expertise that can only be delivered by an ambitious world-class organization

FAB offers unique career choices, a chance to innovate, craft solutions for the future, and express yourself in a performance-based culture that will unleash the best in you. Whether you are an experienced professional or just starting your career, FAB provides a range of learning and development initiatives to support all employees through training and skill development.

At FAB, we place our customers at the core of our activities, live our values each day in every way, celebrate achievements, and empower each other to deliver leading solutions. We have structured plans for the recruitment and career progression of Emirati talent to enable them to make a mark in the financial and banking sector both regionally and globaly that rewards your hard work and dedication.

Join our team and be part of a journey to shape the future of banking.

JOB SUMMARY / INTRODUCTION

• To lead the strategic design, architecture, and enterprise build-out of the bank's AI & Agentic Platform capability, ensuring it serves as a trusted, scalable, and governed foundation for AI-driven decisioning, agentic automation, and enterprise knowledge across the Group.
• The role is pivotal in shaping how AI capability is built, integrated, and adopted across business units, partnering with senior business and technology stakeholders to translate the bank's AI ambition into a coherent platform and solution architecture aligned with FAB's digital, agentic, and AI roadmap, regulatory expectations, and Group strategy.
• The role combines deep technical authority on AI platform architecture with the strategic judgement and stakeholder reach required to direct enterprise AI capability across a tier‑one bank.
• Define and own the target architecture for the AI & Agentic Platform, covering the agentic runtime, action gateway, control plane, knowledge foundation, model gateway and abstraction, evaluation, and observability layers.
• Set and evolve the cloud architecture for AI workloads across Azure and AWS, including hybrid model serving, inference economics, network and identity design, data residency, and the build‑versus‑buy positioning across managed services and bank‑built capabilities.
• Lead the integration architecture between the AI Platform and the bank's core estate, including core banking, risk and credit systems, treasury and finance platforms, the enterprise data platform (Azure and Cloudera), enterprise APIs, ESB, and identity services.
• Establish and govern the engineering, architectural, and AI engineering standards adopted across the AI Platform team, including reference patterns, agent and tool contracts, runtime governance hooks, evaluation discipline, and integration with model risk.
• Shape FAB's multi-year AI capability direction, including build‑versus‑buy positioning, foundation model strategy, proprietary capability investment, and platform evolution in response to changes in the agentic AI and regulatory landscape.
• Partner with the Senior, Platform Engineering and Architecture lead in a two‑in‑a‑box operating model, with a clear separation between platform direction, target architecture, and enterprise positioning (this role) and platform engineering execution and run‑state.
• Build enterprise AI capability across the Group through reference architectures, standards, communities of practice, internal forums, and direct mentorship of senior…