Senior AI Engineer

Company Description

Shawbrook provides finance to a wide range of customer segments that value the premium experience, flexibility and certainly we deliver.  We are a purpose-led organisation, with a focus on delivering long-term sustainable value for all our stakeholders.

We have a diversified offering, with our innovative lending propositions tailored to meet specific customer needs in carefully selected markets across SME, Real Estate and Personal. Our products range from complex structured credit facilities for growth-focused businesses to mortgages for professional landlords and property investors, as well as simple loans for consumers delivered digitally.  We fuel our lending through customer deposits, which we attract by delivering a premium experience, choice and consistently great value to smart savers.

The business model we have created is unique and difficult to replicate, with our ‘best of both’ approach combining deep human expertise with advanced digital, tech and data capabilities.  This combination not only allows us to deliver excellent customer experiences, but to do so efficiently and at scale.  We are proud of our innovative and agile culture, which drives consistently high employee engagement scores and makes Shawbrook an attractive destination for the best talent. If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves, contribute new ideas and believe anything is possible, you’re our kind of person.

Work with us because you:

• Want to be part of a bank built for the dynamics of the modern world
• Relish a challenge and enjoy a fast-paced, innovative and hardworking culture
• Enjoy finding new and better ways to solve complexity and make things happen
• Want to belong to a diverse culture that stands shoulder to shoulder with minority and underrepresented groups
• Care about society and the environment and want to be part of a business that cares too
• Want to continue to grow professionally and be the best version of yourself

Job Description

We are seeking an experienced Senior AI Engineer to join our AI Engineering squad as we scale our in-house artificial intelligence capability across Shawbrook Bank. 

You will join at a pivotal stage of our AI transformation, as we move from experimentation and proof-of-concept initiatives into production-grade AI systems that deliver measurable business value across lending, deposits, operations, risk, and customer experience. Working in close partnership with our AI Product Manager and alongside the AI Engineering Lead, you will design, build, deploy, and operate robust, secure, and compliant AI solutions within a regulated banking environment. 

This is a hands-on, high-impact role for an engineer who wants to own things end-to-end. You will take AI products and shared platform capabilities from prototype through to production, and you'll take on some of our most demanding technical challenges. Chief among them is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) at scale: building retrieval and generation pipelines that stay accurate, fast, and cost-effective across large corpora.  

You will also help raise the bar for how the whole team builds — embedding the controls production AI needs, such as evaluation, observability, and responsible-AI guardrails. You’ll also be mentoring other engineers as the team grows. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Design, build, and operate end-to-end AI systems (LLM/RAG pipelines, retrieval, and agentic workflows) from prototype through to production. 

• Own AI products and shared, reusable platform capabilities end-to-end, enabling teams across the Bank to adopt AI without building from scratch. 

• Develop deep expertise in our AI platform and applications, with a good working understanding of other domains across the Bank (lending, data, risk, and operations). 

• Tackle our hardest technical problems, in particular retrieval-augmented generation at scale across large corpora. 

• Build and maintain the controls that production AI depends on (evaluation frameworks, observability, testing, and CI/CD). 

• Embed responsible-AI principles (explainability, guardrails, and appropriate governance) within a regulated environment. 

• Design well-documented, self-service APIs that other teams can adopt independently. 

• Lead projects independently, unblocking your own work and unblocking others across the team. 

• Mentor and support other AI Engineers through pairing, code review, and pragmatic engineering standards. 

• Support engineers in the wider Shawbrook Engineering department with AI adoption and upskilling. 

• Work within an agile, cross-functional squad to deliver iteratively and aligned to business value. 

Qualifications

Essential 

• You have designed, built, and deployed LLM and machine-learning systems in production, ideally including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). 

• Confident building backend services and APIs in Python, with sound testing, observability, and CI/CD practices. 

• Experience delivering on a major cloud platform, preferably Azure. 

• Comfortable evaluating AI systems for accuracy and reliability, and with the controls needed to run them responsibly. 

• You can take work from idea to production independently and enjoy owning it end-to-end. 

• Experience mentoring and leading others. 

• Relevant academic background in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related discipline.  

Nice to have 

• Experience with semantic or vector search at scale, including performance and cost tuning. 

• Professional certifications in cloud platforms (e.g., Azure AI Engineer Associate) would be beneficial. 

• Background in machine learning engineering/operations. 

• Exposure to .NET (some of our services are .NET-based). 

• Experience in regulated environments. 

Additional Information

Your Wellbeing - We take your health and well-being very seriously by providing a range of benefits to give you and your family peace of mind. These include:

• Market leading family friendly policies such as access to our Maternity, Adoption and Paternity policies from Day 1 of your employment
• Free access to Headspace, a mindfulness & meditation digital health app
• Free access to Peppy digital health app that offers personalised support through fertility treatment becoming a parent or menopause
• EAP (Employee Assistance Programme) - Offering you support on a wide range of subjects including financial concerns, mental wellbeing and more general queries around family, work, housing, and health
• Cycle to work scheme
• Discounts on gym membership
• Contributory pension scheme & death in service

Your Lifestyle - It’s important you strike the right balance between your work and personal life. We provide benefits to support you when at work and when you’re enjoying your leisure time.

• Minimum of 27 days holiday per year
• Option to buy or sell holiday days through our flexi-holiday scheme
• Discounts on gym membership nationwide
• Access to discounts on a range of high street and online brands
• Community support and charitable giving

Your Contribution - We’re focused on rewarding those that go the extra mile in helping us achieve our goals.

• Participation in our annual discretionary bonus scheme designed to reward your contribution to our success
• Proudly Shawbrook recognition scheme focused on recognising our role models and thanking our colleagues for a job well done