Head of AI Engineering

The Role

Validata is growing, and we are looking for a highly skilled Head of AI Engineering to raise the bar on delivery and quality for mission-critical banking environments. You'll be at the forefront of building and optimising production-grade LLM systems, reusable APIs and Agentic AI workflows to automate complex financial tasks. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can balance strategy and execution—setting direction, enabling teams, and making sure we deliver measurable outcomes for customers.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive Validata's Agentic AI roadmap, aligning AI innovation with measurable
  business outcomes

• Lead agile innovation cycles from ideation through proof of concept, MVP, and go-to-
  market

• Architect multi-agent systems — covering role definition, tool integration, planning,
  memory, and workflow orchestration

• Build and optimise RAG pipelines and semantic search using vector databases, including
  indexing, retrieval policies, and evaluation

• Integrate agent tools (MCP) and APIs to connect agents with external services, databases, and internal systems — with robust error handling and output validation

• Design evaluation frameworks to systematically assess agent performance across key
  operational metrics

• Apply advanced prompt and context engineering and implement guardrails to reduce
  hallucinations

• Deploy scalable AI services to cloud infrastructure with full observability and monitoring

• Build microservices-based architectures and instrument agents for tracing, metrics, and
  continuous improvement

• Partner with stakeholders to shape requirements and deliver intuitive human-AI interfaces
  (voice, chat)

• Use data analysis to inform agent capabilities, optimise retrieval, and drive decision-
  making

• Mentor and upskill team members on agent frameworks, LLM best practices, and AI
  safety

Experience and Qualifications

• MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, or a related field

• Proven experience building and deploying AI/ML applications in FinTech, Banking & Payments, or financial services

• Strong Python skills and proficiency with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn)

• Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks

• Experience with generative models

• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes)

• Experience fine-tuning SLMs using LoRA, QLoRA, or DoRA; quantization and distillation are a plus

• Familiarity with prompt optimisation frameworks and evaluation suite design

• Strong communication skills — equally comfortable with engineers and executive stakeholders

• Experience leading data science teams and fostering a culture of growth and shared learning

• Strong leadership presence and communication skills with the ability to delegate responsibilities effectively unblock teams, and drive decisions

• Excellent English communication skills: clear written and verbal communication

• Ability to make decisions in a fast-paced, dynamic environment

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary, plus additional benefits and perks

• Holiday and vacation allowance

• A long-term challenging role with meaningful ownership and impact

• Work in an agile environment on high-profile banking projects

• Flexible working built around you — choose remote, hybrid, or onsite, with the freedom to adapt your schedule and setup to what helps you do your best work

• Growth is a priority: we invest in your development with continuous learning and mentorship to build the skills that move your career forward

• Join a supportive, collaborative team where knowledge is shared, wins are celebrated, and you’re set up to thrive

Equal Employment Opportunity Policy
Validata Group is an equal opportunity employer. We provide equal employment opportunities to all
applicants and employees, and we’re committed to an inclusive workplace where everyone is treated with
dignity and respect and diverse perspectives are truly valued.

If this sounds interesting and you think we might “click”, we’d be happy to hear from you!