Responsible AI Lead

JOB TITLE: Responsible AI Lead

SALARY: £90,440 - £110,000 per annum

LOCATION: Manchester

HOURS: Full-time – 35 hours

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

About this opportunity…

Exciting opportunity for a hands-on Responsible AI Lead to join our Voice, Workforce Intelligence Lab. You’ll lead a cross-functional team to build and evolve our telephony and digital platforms. This is a technical team lead role combining technical depth with people leadership.

As a senior leader in the lab, you will provide technical leadership in shaping and delivering next-generation capabilities—integrating advanced software engineering practices with Language Models and Generative AI within a cloud-native architecture. Your expertise will drive innovation, set engineering standards, and influence the strategic direction of cutting-edge solutions.

Developing the upcoming era of autonomous AI for colleagues and customers is our focus - ensuring safety, security, and scalability. As a Responsible AI Lead, you'll set technical direction and lead multiple teams to design, build and run AI Agents on Google Cloud, blending open-source tools with GCP native services. You'll stay hands-on when needed and help grow engineering capability - all while delivering outcomes at pace in a regulated environment.

About us…

We’re on an exciting journey and there couldn’t be a better time to join us. The investments we’re making in our people, data, and technology are leading to innovative projects, fresh possibilities, and countless new ways for our people to work, learn, and thrive.

What you’ll do…

• Define strategy and technical direction for agentic AI services (patterns, standards, runtime quality), working closely with Engineering peers, Product & 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 (including Agent Builder), Cloud Run/GKE, Pub/Sub, CloudSQL, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Secret Manager and IAM, integrating securely with enterprise systems.

• Achieve efficiently with quality: 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 FinOps.

• Lead the full lifecycle (design, build, run, iterate), ensuring resilience, scalability and operability.

• Influence and lead others in the platform by providing reusable components, patterns, and templates; leading vendor interactions; streamlining the tech infrastructure; and communicating effectively with senior collaborators.

What you’ll need…

• Proficiency in Java, Python and TypeScript, 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, optimizing performance, and managing incidents.

• Solid knowledge of security, privacy and compliance in regulated environments; confident 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.

It would be great if you had any of the following…

• Experience with Vertex AI Agent Builder/Agentspace, LangGraph, 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.

About working for us…

Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms. We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture. And it’s why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups. We’re disability confident. So if you’d like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes…

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%

• An annual bonus award, subject to Group performance

• Share schemes including free shares

• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping

• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

Want to do amazing work, that’s interesting and makes a difference to millions of people? Join our journey!