Senior Lead Data & AI Scientist

We're rebooting an icon and building the future of finance.

Find out why you should join us.

Job Share;
Hybrid Working

JOB TITLE: Senior Lead Data & AI Scientist

LOCATION(S): Manchester

HOURS: Full Time

WORKING PATTERN: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of your time, at one of our office sites.

Do you want to shape how AI, machine learning and agentic technologies improve the financial wellbeing of millions of customers?

As a Senior Lead Data Scientist and AI & Machine Learning Engineer within our Financial Wellbeing Platform, you'll play a leading role in defining and delivering innovative AI solutions that help colleagues and customers make better financial decisions. You'll work across predictive AI, generative AI and intelligent agent technologies, combining deep technical expertise with strategic leadership to deliver solutions safely, responsibly and at scale!

You’ll help define our AI capability roadmap, influence technical direction across multiple teams and support the growth of data science and AI engineering capability across the Platform!

• Lead the design, development and optimisation of AI and machine learning solutions that address complex business challenges.
• Own delivery across the end-to-end AI lifecycle, from experimentation and model development through to deployment, monitoring and continuous improvement.
• Provide technical leadership across large, multi-team programmes, helping teams make sound engineering and architectural decisions.
• Partner with product, engineering, data and business teams to deliver scalable AI-powered products and services.
• Embed responsible AI, governance and risk management practices throughout development and deployment activities.
• Coach and develop data scientists and AI engineers, supporting capability growth and knowledge sharing across the wider organisation.

These requirements reflect the role's focus on AI delivery, technical leadership, software engineering, machine learning and enterprise-scale data science capability.

Like the modern Britain we serve, we're evolving. Investing in our people, data and technology to transform how we support customers and communities.

We're growing our AI and machine learning capability to help shape the future of financial services. This is an opportunity to work with talented colleagues, solve meaningful problems and influence how AI is applied at enterprise scale.

You’ll join a collaborative environment where learning, innovation and continuous improvement are encouraged, and where you'll have the opportunity to make a genuine impact through your work.

We're looking for someone who combines advanced data science expertise with software engineering capability and technical leadership experience.

Specifically, we're interested in:

• Data Science
  :
  Extensive experience developing, tuning and evaluating machine learning models and AI solutions in production environments.
• Machine Learning
  :
  Deep understanding of modern machine learning techniques, model deployment, monitoring and optimisation practices.
• Software Engineering
  :
  Strong capability building production-ready services using Python, SQL and modern engineering practices, including APIs, event-driven architectures and microservices.
• Technology Leadership
  :
  Experience providing technical leadership across complex, multi-team deliveries, influencing strategy and enabling high-quality outcomes.
• Critical Thinking
  :
  Ability to solve complex problems, analyse information effectively and make informed decisions in ambiguous environments.
• Stakeholder Management
  :
  Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly and build effective partnerships across engineering, product and business stakeholders.

• Building agentic AI solutions, LLM-powered applications and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures.
• Experience with Vertex AI Agent Builder, Agentspace, Lang Graph or multi-agent frameworks.
• Knowledge of responsible AI, model governance and risk management practices within…