AI Technical Lead (Solutions and Engineering)

We regulate financial services firms in the UK, to keep financial markets fair, thriving and effective. By joining us, you’ll play a key part in protecting consumers, driving economic growth, and shaping the future of UK finance services.

The Data, Technology and Innovation (DTI) division enables the FCA to be a digital-first, data-led smart regulator by delivering a secure, agile, and cost-effective technology and data ecosystem that drives better decisions, transparency, and operational efficiency.

The AI Product Delivery Department (AIPD) exists to transform FCA business processes through AI, safely and at scale. It provides the product-led capability to meet growing organisational demand, moving work from promising AI experiments into live, adopted services. Its operating model combines portfolio and value management, platforms and engineering, and three cross-functional delivery pods focused on Authorisations, Supervision and Enforcement priorities. The Products and Delivery Team owns pace, execution and adoption: turning validated business problems into secure products, embedding AI into real workflows, using evaluation, provenance and go-live discipline

You will provide hands-on technical leadership for one pod. You will translate product outcomes into a coherent, secure and operable solution, leads internal and supplier engineers, and ensures the product can move from MVP to production without avoidable architectural rework.

Role responsibilities

• Lead the pod’s technical execution, translating product outcomes into implementable solutions, guiding engineering decisions, maintaining clear technical decision records and aligning delivery pragmatically with shared FCA platform standards, enterprise constraints and long-term sustainability

• Shape the technical foundations of a newly established AI Product Delivery function and, together with the Platforms and Engineering team, defining engineering standards, reusable patterns and delivery approaches that will influence multiple AI products across the organisation

• Translate product and operational requirements into scalable end-to-end solutions spanning user journeys, APIs, events, data flows, AI services and enterprise integrations, ensuring technology delivers measurable business value

• Conduct technical design reviews, supplier engagement, code reviews, assurance activities and engineering oversight while mentoring teams and remaining hands-on enough to validate critical assumptions ensuring internal and supplier engineers operate to industry best practice and FCA strategic standards, while promoting effective knowledge transfer, mentoring and sustainable code ownership

• Drive intelligent technology decisions by selecting the most appropriate approach across deterministic software, workflow automation, retrieval systems, foundation models and agentic solutions

• Design how deterministic services, workflow orchestration, specialised agents, tools, memory and human approval operate as one governed system, applying the minimum level of agency necessary for the use case

• Design for evidence and provenance where the risk tier requires it: traceable inputs, source evidence, tool calls, outputs, approvals, versions, corrections and replay

• Own the integration, drawing on shared data, security and knowledge-architecture specialists rather than duplicating enterprise functions

• Define technical readiness - resilience, performance, observability, support and incident handling - and provide the technical readiness view for go-live.

Present progress and summaries to non-technical staff up to senior leadership team and beyond as required *

• A solid practical background as a staff, principal or lead engineer delivering complex production systems

• Experience designing cloud-native architectures across APIs, distributed systems, events or workflow platforms

Experience leading internal or supplier engineers through design review, code review and coaching *

Essential:

• Taking AI-enabled and data-intensive products from proof of concept to fully operational and supported services

• Developing robust, production-ready code with security by design, observability, testing and CI/CD

• Integrating enterprise systems while balancing rapid MVP delivery with sustainable architecture

• Making clear, well-documented technical decisions and constructively challenging assumptions and approaches

• Designing systems that maintain human oversight, auditability and accountability for decisions

• Driving knowledge management and ensuring effective transfer of technical expertise into permanent organisational ownership

Particularly valuable: experience with AWS Bedrock and AgentCore; RAG, agentic workflows, LLM judges and evaluation-driven development and human-in-the-loop systems. Designing controlled learning and adaptation loops in which operational outcomes can generate lessons, skills or changes to prompts, tools and workflows, with evaluation, versioning, approval and rollback before production deployment. Entity resolution, temporal modelling, provenance, event driven architectures, graph or knowledge architectures - including decision-record patterns. Regulated, public-sector or high-accountability delivery. *

• Salary: London from £59,200 to £88,600 per annum and National (Edinburgh and Leeds) ranging from £53,800 to £80,600 (salary offered will be based on skills and experience), * 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays
• Colleagues spend a minimum of 50% of their working time in the office each month (60% for Directors and Executive Directors) across our London, Leeds and Edinburgh offices

• Non-contributory pension (8-12% depending on age) and life assurance at eight times your salary

• Private healthcare with Bupa, income protection, and 24/7 Employee Assistance

• 35 hours of paid volunteering annually

Our colleagues are the key to our success as a regulator. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture: one that’s free from discrimination and bias, celebrates difference, and supports colleagues to deliver at their best. We believe that our differences and similarities enable us to be a better organisation - one that makes better decisions, drives innovation, and delivers better regulation.

If you require any adjustments due to a disability or condition, your recruiter is here to help - reach out for tailored support.

We welcome diverse working styles and aim to find flexible solutions that suit both the role and individual needs, including options like part-time and job sharing where applicable.