Lead / Staff Forward Deployed Engineer (SVP)

Description

The company is building agentic AI systems that go beyond chat tools to reason, plan and carry out multi-step workflows.

The Applied AI and Agents Factory brings engineers together to turn advanced AI into production solutions, working alongside business and technology teams from concept through to live deployment.

The role is a senior technical anchor embedded in Line of Business delivery pods. You will lead technical discovery, design end-to-end agentic workflows for key business use cases, lead complex integrations with core banking backends, and mentor engineers in the pod.

The Factory is hands-on and focused on fast delivery. You will solve hard technical problems, shape architecture, and help build reusable tools and engineering standards used across the company.

Responsibilities

• Act as the senior technical authority in the squad, working with business stakeholders and domain experts to turn complex, unclear operational processes into sound architectures.
• Design, build and deploy production-grade agent reasoning loops and multi-agent workflows in Python, using graph-based state engines such as LangGraph and enterprise agent orchestration runtimes.
• Run rapid prototyping sprints that produce working conversational and multi-agent prototypes within days, testing business feasibility, user trust and interaction design before full production build.
• Co-design Human-in-the-Loop review interfaces and feedback mechanisms with business users to drive adoption, trust and operational transparency.
• Lead the design and build of secure Model Context Protocol servers, OpenAPI bridges and gRPC or REST connectors that link agents to sensitive core banking systems, databases and microservices.
• Architect enterprise RAG pipelines with hybrid search (dense vector plus sparse BM25), semantic caching, contextual chunking, re-ranking and knowledge graph integration.
• Implement zero-trust security for agent execution, including mutual TLS, OAuth2/OIDC token delegation, enterprise secret vaults and sandboxed container environments.
• Set coding standards, run rigorous code and architecture reviews, and mentor Senior (C13) and Junior/Mid (C12) engineers in the squad.
• Work with the Principal Architect and FDE team to build automated evaluation testbeds measuring task completion, tool call correctness, latency and hallucinations, and to add enterprise safety guardrails to deployment pipelines.
• Find recurring field patterns and extract reusable agent modules, prompt templates and integration harnesses for core enterprise platforms.
• Assess risk when making business decisions, protecting the firm's reputation and its clients and assets, complying with laws, rules and regulations and Policy, and escalating and reporting control issues openly.

Requirements

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 6+ years in backend or distributed systems.
• 2+ years building and deploying production LLM applications, with real implementation experience in agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel or ADK, or in custom state-machine reasoning engines.
• Strong command of Python, Java or Go, asyncio, state machines, container orchestration with Docker, Kubernetes or OpenShift, relational and NoSQL databases, and Kafka.
• Proven experience integrating enterprise APIs, building secure tool-calling environments and applying zero-trust identity delegation.
• Experience in forward-deployed, customer-facing or embedded engineering roles, turning unclear business problems into working software prototypes.
• Strong leadership, mentoring, communication and stakeholder collaboration skills.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience. A Master's degree is preferred.

Conditions

Full-time role based in London, with a hybrid model of up to 2 days working from home per week.

The base salary is competitive and reviewed annually.

Equal opportunity employer; see the EEO Policy Statement and Know Your Rights poster.

Benefits

• 27 days annual leave plus bank holidays.
• A discretionary annual performance-related bonus.
• Private medical care and life insurance.
• Employee Assistance Program and pension plan.
• Paid parental leave.
• Employee discounts for employees, family and friends.
• Details are on the company's Global Benefits page.