Lead AI Engineer - E3

Join us as a Lead AI Engineer and play a key role in shaping the future of AI across Customer Operations. We're looking for a technical leader who enjoys solving complex challenges, building innovative AI products and helping teams perform at their best.

You’ll work hands‑on with the latest AI technologies to design and deploy enterprise‑scale solutions, while defining the architecture, standards and guardrails that enable AI to be adopted safely, securely and effectively across the organisation. From influencing strategy and leading engineering teams to delivering cutting‑edge AI capabilities, you’ll help unlock the full potential of AI for our customers, colleagues and business.

At Nationwide we offer hybrid working wherever possible. More rewarding relationships are supported through our hybrid approach, bringing colleagues together across our UK wide estate, whilst also supporting generous access to home working. We value our time in the office to solve problems, to learn, and to feel connected.

For this job you’ll spend at least two days per week, or if part time you’ll spend 40% of your working time, based at either our London, Swindon or Northampton office. If your application is successful, your hiring manager will provide further details on how this works. You can also find out more about our approach to hybrid working here.

You’ll provide technical leadership for AI initiatives across Customer Operations, shaping enterprise AI architecture, standards and governance while building innovative AI solutions that deliver business value. Working hands‑on with Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Claude and open‑source large language models, you’ll design and deploy enterprise‑scale AI products using agentic AI, RAG, vector search and machine learning technologies. You’ll lead a blended team of AI engineers and vendor partners, driving delivery while establishing best practices for AI engineering, LLMOps, security and Responsible AI.

Working closely with architecture, security, risk and business stakeholders, you’ll influence AI strategy, accelerate adoption and ensure solutions are delivered safely, securely and s is a hands‑on leadership role, combining technical expertise with the ability to guide teams, shape standards and unlock the value of AI across the organisation.

As a minimum, we are looking for:

• AI & GenAI Platform Leadership – Excellent experience designing and delivering AI solutions using Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Claude and open‑source LLMs, driving adoption across enterprise platforms.
• Engineering Leadership & Delivery – Deep software engineering expertise, strong Python skills, and hands‑on delivery of AI/ML solutions using OpenRAG, Omni Vec, Llama, PyTorch, Tensor Flow, Keras and Scikit‑learn.
• Enterprise AI Governance & LLMOps – Experience establishing AI guardrails, model governance, AI evaluation frameworks, observability, monitoring, security controls, prompt engineering, Responsible AI and LLMOps practices.
• Agentic AI, Vector Platforms & Architecture – Hands‑on experience implementing multi‑agent AI systems, RAG platforms, vector databases (Cosmos DB), semantic search, embeddings and enterprise AI architecture patterns.
• AI Platform Engineering & Dev Ops Leadership – Experience defining and implementing CI/CD standards for AI solutions, deploying to Azure AI Foundry using Git Hub Actions and Azure Dev Ops, and establishing best practices for secure, scalable and reliable AI platforms.
• AI Leadership & Strategy – Experience leading AI products, programmes, or work streams, with knowledge in reasoning models, multimodal AI, AI orchestration platforms, AI‑assisted development (vibe coding), and defining enterprise AI…