Role: Principal AI Engineer - Lead Colleague AI Transformation (Financial Services)
Location: Central London, Hybrid working 2/3 times per week from the office, the rest from home
Start Date: ASAP
End Date: 6 Months initially
Daily Rate: Very competitive day rate, Inside IR35
Overall Purpose of the Role
We are seeking a hands-on Principal AI Engineer to act as the technical right hand for the Automation & AI Practice, accelerating the Colleague AI agenda. This pivotal role will transition the organisation from isolated AI experiments to a fully resourced, governed, and scalable AI delivery capability. You will seed in-house expertise to reduce vendor dependency, mitigate key person risk, and govern shadow AI usage across the business.
Key Responsibilities
Provide hands-on technical leadership across Colleague AI initiatives including Sierra PoC and Claude roll-out, owning architecture and design.
Drive the build of agentic AI solutions for Tribeless colleagues.
Consult on the broader Colleague AI backlog (complaint triage, helpdesk assistant, inbox routing, QA/QC), ensuring solutions are fit for purpose, secure, low risk, and cost-efficient amid consumption-based AI pricing.
Define and embed AI engineering standards, reference architectures, and reusable patterns, collaborating with infrastructure teams to govern shadow AI usage.
Lead AI literacy and enablement across Digital and the wider business.
Mentor and uplift the Automation Practice team to diffuse AI capability and support transition to a permanent in-house AI Engineering Manager.
Represent the Automation & AI Practice in cross-functional forums, translating AI strategy into delivery roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
Skills & Experience Required
Deep, hands-on technical leadership experience at Principal/Lead level.
Strong expertise in Generative AI, LLMs, agentic architectures, and multi-agent systems with proven production delivery in regulated environments (FS preferred).
Proven experience building agentic solutions using Microsoft Copilot Studio/Foundry, AWS Bedrock/AgentCore, and frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, Strands.
Comfortable across Microsoft and AWS cloud ecosystems, including LLM gateway/Bedrock patterns, data residency, SSO/OIDC federation, and cost controls.
Experience with Claude/Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot families, including MCP, connectors, skills, and trade-offs.
Strong understanding of AI testing disciplines (accuracy, hallucination, bias, prompt evaluations) and AI governance/risk (DPIA, data classification, FCA considerations).
Excellent stakeholder management skills, able to engage from board-level to engineer-level.
Mentorship and capability-building mindset to strengthen the team and avoid key-person dependency.
Initial Areas of Focus & Benefits
Sierra PoC – enhancing client NPS, helpdesk demand deflection, and colleague efficiencies.
Claude Roll-out – boosting colleague productivity.
AI Enablement – improving AI literacy and adoption across the business.
AI Citizen Development Framework – accelerating solution time to market and reducing digital dependency.
Copilot Continuous Improvement – driving ongoing colleague productivity gains.
If you are a visionary AI leader ready to shape the AI future and build sustainable, scalable AI capabilities, we want to hear from you.
Neutral 2–4 sentence summary of what working at this company is like, drawn from public reviews and press coverage. Tone, collaboration style, pace, benefits highlights.
£45,000 – £60,000 (Glassdoor, Levels.fyi, 2025)
