Principal Engineer – AI Productivity Lab

Job Title

Principal Engineer – AI Productivity Lab (Band

F)

£92,701- £169,403, depending on location and experience

Bristol, Edinburgh, Leeds or Manchester

Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, at our office location.

We are looking for Principal Engineers to join our new AI Productivity Lab. The purpose of the Lab is to accelerate internal AI-driven employee productivity and process automation using the latest agentic coworking technologies. You will provide hands-on technical leadership for building domain-specific agents and tooling, and for developing internal knowledge and skills repositories that enable safe, repeatable automation aligned to business area operating procedures.

Working with the Head of the Lab, you will execute agentic coworking initiatives with targeted business areas, partnering with line-of-business champions to embed agents into team processes, SOPs and tooling and to realise and measure benefits. You will be working within the Data & AI Unit of the Chief Technology Office (CTO), where we define and lead the Group’s Data and AI technology strategy, serve as the Group’s design authority for Data and AI, and inspire, develop and incubate new AI-driven products, capabilities and ways of working through applied research and product discovery.

• Lead the engineering of coworking solutions (agents, tools and automations) for priority business areas, taking designs from prototype to operational MVP
• Design and build reusable capabilities for the Lab’s coworking platform and repository (skills, tools and operating procedure assets) with a clear path to adoption
• Apply hands‑on experience of agentic coding and/or coworking tools and the open‑source ecosystem to evaluate options, recommend approaches and accelerate delivery
• Partner with business stakeholders and line‑of‑business champions to shape use cases, embed solutions into SOPs and measure outcomes
• Coach and mentor engineers through technical leadership, code review and constructive feedback, and engage senior stakeholders on technical direction

• Proven experience leading the delivery of technology solutions to business areas in complex production environments, with ownership of business outcomes
• Extensive knowledge and hands‑on experience of solutions architecture, software engineering and business process automation
• Strong hands‑on experience with agentic coding and/or coworking technology and ecosystem (e.g. Claude Code and/or Cowork, Open Claw, Git Hub Copilot)
• Strong understanding of operational processes and risk management (Financial Services preferred)
• Ability to influence stakeholders and guide teams through ambiguity, translating productivity opportunities into clear technical direction and MVPs

• Expertise in knowledge management, enterprise ontology and knowledge graph technology
• Business process optimisation experience (e.g. Business Process Modelling, Lean Six Sigma)
• Experience with applied research / experimentation
• Advanced degree (MSc, PhD) in computer science, artificial intelligence or a related subject

If you think all banks are the same, you’d be wrong. We’re an innovative, fast‑changing business that’s shaping finance as a force for good. A bank that’s empowering its people to innovate, explore possibilities and grow with purpose.

Our focus is to ensure we’re inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms. We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture. We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative.

And it’s why we especially welcome applications from under‑represented groups. We’re disability confident. So if you’d like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• An annual…