AI Engineering Lead, GenAI Platform

The AI Engineering team at 9fin is building the next generation of AI capabilities that will power our products for years to come. We're looking for an Engineering Lead to lead the GenAI Platform team, building the shared foundations that enable product teams to develop and operate AI-powered products and agents. Reporting to the Head of AI, you'll own the team's development, technical direction and delivery. You'll shape the platform strategy and roadmap, working with product and engineering teams to understand their needs and decide where shared capabilities will have the greatest impact. You'll combine people leadership with strong engineering judgement, staying close to architecture and code while giving engineers the support and autonomy to do their best work. Every day is different, but here's an example of the kind of things you'll work on:

• Lead and grow the team through hiring, coaching, feedback and clear expectations for performance and development.

• Set the GenAI platform's direction and priorities, evaluate technical approaches and adapt the roadmap as product needs and evidence evolve.

• Own the delivery and operation of reliable, secure and scalable platform capabilities, balancing quality, performance, cost and speed of development.

• Make the GenAI platform easy for other engineers to adopt and extend through effective APIs, tooling, documentation and clear ownership.

• Partner with AI and evaluation specialists to establish how platform changes are tested, measured and released.

• Work with product, engineering and security colleagues to resolve dependencies, communicate trade-offs and turn emerging needs into sustainable capabilities.

• Have experience directly managing software engineers, including hiring, performance management and career development.

• Can build a team with clear priorities, give useful feedback and support engineers to take ownership of their work.

• Have built shared platforms or developer tools that other engineering teams adopted, and understand what makes those teams successful.

• Can translate product needs into reusable capabilities and balance immediate delivery with longer-term platform development.

• Have built or operated complex LLM-powered applications or agent systems in production.

• Understand the challenges of non-deterministic systems, including evaluation, quality regressions, tool use, reliability, security and cost.

• Have a strong backend or infrastructure engineering background, with ownership of distributed production systems in the cloud.

• Understand how to operate services reliably, including monitoring, incident response, performance and cost management.

• Have the technical depth to review designs and code, assess alternatives and help engineers work through difficult problems.

• Communicate trade-offs clearly, build effective partnerships across teams and use evidence to make decisions in ambiguous situations.

Experience with any of the following would be highly advantageous:

• Event-driven architectures or long-running asynchronous workloads

• Secure execution environments and access controls

• AI evaluation, experimentation or observability

• Platforms handling sensitive data in finance or other high-trust environments

• Competitive Salary (our salary bands are benchmarked at the top end of the market)

• Equity

• Pension (your minimum contributions are 4% with 9fin matching up to 7%)

• Private Medical Insurance

• Paid sick leave with Income Protection for long periods of illness

• Group Life Assurance

• Season Ticket Loan & Cycle to Work schemes

• 25 holiday days per year

• Local public holidays (with the ability to exchange them for alternative days)

• Work abroad for up to 3 months a year

• 1 month paid sabbatical after 5 years of service

• Enhanced parental leave & flexible working arrangements available

• Professional learning and development budget

• AI experimentation budget

• Quarterly team socials

• Summer and Winter company social events