AI Lead

Job Description Summary

In this role, you will lead cross‑functional teams to develop responsible AI solutions, combining technical expertise with people leadership.

Job Title: Responsible AI Lead

Salary: £90,440 - £110,000 per annum

Location: Manchester

Hours: Full‑time – 35 hours

Working Pattern: Hybrid – at least two days per week in the Manchester office.

• Define strategy and technical direction for agentic AI services, collaborating with Engineering, Product, and 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, Cloud Run/GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud
  
  SQL, Big Query, Cloud Storage, Secret Manager, and IAM, and integrate securely with enterprise systems.
• Ensure efficient, high-quality delivery: 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) to guarantee resilience, scalability, and operability.
• Influence and lead others in the platform by providing reusable components, patterns, and templates; manage vendor interactions; streamline tech infrastructure; and communicate 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, continuous integration/continuous deployment, automated quality assurance, observability, performance optimisation, and incident management.
• Solid knowledge of security, privacy, and compliance in regulated environments; comfortable 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.

We focus on inclusivity, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity. We are disability confident and provide reasonable adjustments during recruitment processes.

• Generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• Annual bonus award, subject to Group performance
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits adaptable to lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
• 30 days holiday, plus bank holidays
• Wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

Join our journey and help shape the financial services of the future.

At Lloyds Banking Group, we are committed to creating a values‑led culture and building a workforce that reflects the diversity of the customers and communities we serve. All individuals have the opportunity to make a real difference.