AI Platform Lead

Location: South East London

Commercial Lending AI Platform Lead – Director

Location:

London Working pattern:
Hybrid/1-2 days per week onsite Contract length:
Initially 6 months IR35 status:
Inside IR35 Rate:
Competitive The strongest candidate will be a senior platform engineering or architecture leader who has personally led the creation and production operation of an enterprise AI platform. You should combine deep engineering credibility with agentic AI expertise, enterprise architecture, large-scale technology leadership and executive stakeholder management. Crucially, your experience should demonstrate ownership of the underlying platform capabilities that enable multiple teams to develop, deploy, govern and operate AI solutions  role A major financial services organisation is undertaking a three-to-four-year transformation of Commercial Lending, centred on Matrix, its strategic agentic AI platform.

Matrix will provide the foundational capabilities required to support next-generation lending journeys, colleague experiences, intelligent decisioning and broader technology use cases. As Commercial Lending AI Platform Lead, you will have end-to-end ownership of the strategy, architecture, engineering, delivery and operation of Matrix and the wider Commercial Lending AI platform ecosystem. The focus is on creating secure, scalable and governed platform foundations that allow multiple teams to build, deploy and operate agentic AI safely within a highly regulated enterprise.

This is a Director-level technology leadership position rather than a traditional Head of AI, AI Product Lead, Delivery Director or Data Science Lead role. You will need deep technical credibility in AI platform architecture and engineering, combined with experience leading major transformation, multidisciplinary teams and executive-level stakeholder engagement. Key responsibilities Own the Commercial Lending AI platform strategy, target architecture and roadmap.

Lead the design, engineering and evolution of Matrix and its associated enterprise AI capabilities. Establish foundations for agent orchestration, agent lifecycle management and controlled production deployment. Lead the integration and serving of LLMs and other models within an enterprise platform. Develop reusable services and patterns for tool integration, APIs and retrieval architectures. Establish observability, monitoring, evaluation and operational controls for AI systems.

Drive software and platform engineering standards across automation, testing, reliability and resilience. Own the technology lifecycle from architecture and build through implementation, production operations and continuous optimisation. Ensure the platform meets relevant security, risk, regulatory, responsible AI and resilience requirements. Lead multidisciplinary engineering, platform engineering and architecture teams. Translate Commercial Lending priorities into scalable technical capabilities in partnership with business, product, engineering, architecture and risk stakeholders.

Own delivery sequencing, cost, platform adoption, engineering quality and operational performance. Represent the platform strategy at senior and executive governance forums. Key skills and experience Deep, hands-on AI platform architecture and engineering expertise. Demonstrable delivery and production operation of enterprise-scale agentic AI platforms. Strong cloud-native architecture, distributed systems and modern software engineering experience. In-depth understanding of agentic architectures, orchestration frameworks and agent lifecycle management.

Strong knowledge of LLM ecosystems, model integration and model-serving approaches. Practical experience with retrieval architectures, tool integration and enterprise APIs. experience establishing AI observability, evaluation frameworks, governance and operational controls. Evidence of creating reusable services, frameworks, standards and engineering patterns for multiple development teams. Strong understanding of security, scalability, availability, resilience and production operations. experience leading large multidisciplinary engineering and architecture capabilities.

Major transformation experience within complex governance environments. Strong commercial, financial, risk and executive stakeholder-management capability. Nice to have experience within financial services or another highly regulated environment. Agile and servant leadership experience.

Job Title:

AI Platform Lead

Location:

London, UK Job Type:…