Lead Agentic AI Architect

Job title: Lead Agentic AI Architect

Rate: £710 per day Inside ir35

Location: London, Birmingham, or Sheffield (Whichever is closest)

Hybrid (3 days per week on site)

Contract: 6-month rolling

On behalf of a leading digital transformation consultancy, we're seeking a Lead Agentic AI Architect to join a major enterprise AI transformation programme with a leading UK bank.

This is a genuinely senior opportunity to define the architecture, engineering standards and delivery of next-generation Agentic AI and Generative AI solutions within a complex, highly regulated environment. You'll operate at the intersection of AI strategy, enterprise architecture and hands‑on engineering, taking ambitious AI initiatives from concept and roadmap through to secure, scalable production.

Responsibilities:

• You’ll take ownership of the architecture for enterprise AI capabilities, including:
• Agentic AI platforms, AI assistants, copilots and autonomous workflows
• Multi-agent systems incorporating reasoning, planning, memory, orchestration and tool integration
• Production-grade LLM and RAG architectures
• Intelligent search, knowledge assistants, workflow automation and decision-support systems
• Enterprise LLMOps, MLOps, observability and AI governance
• AI security, guardrails, evaluation and Responsible AI
• Cloud AI platforms and hybrid/multi-cloud architecture

You’ll also provide technical leadership across architects, engineers and data scientists while working with senior stakeholders to shape AI strategy, roadmaps, investment priorities and transformation programmes.

Expereince Required:

We're looking for an established AI architecture or engineering leader with:

• 15+ years of software engineering, architecture or platform leadership
• 8+ years delivering AI/ML platforms into production
• Proven experience architecting and deploying Agentic AI, LLM and Generative AI solutions at enterprise scale
• Strong experience with RAG and LLM application architectures
• A background within banking, financial services or another highly regulated environment
• Experience leading large engineering teams and complex technology transformations
• A track record of taking AI platforms from strategy and architecture through to production and operationalisation
• Strong executive stakeholder engagement and the ability to translate AI capabilities into measurable business outcomes

Technology:

Agentic AI & GenAI

• Multi-Agent Systems
• Agentic AI Architecture
• RAG
• LLM Applications
• Prompt Engineering
• Responsible AI
• AI Evaluation

Frameworks

• LangChain
• LangGraph
• Semantic Kernel
• AutoGen

Cloud & AI Platforms

• Azure AI Foundry
• Azure OpenAI
• AWS Bedrock
• SageMaker
• Google Vertex AI
• Hybrid/Multi-Cloud

Engineering & Platform

• Python
• Java
• Scala
• TypeScript
• SQL
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Terraform
• Bicep
• CI/CD
• Infrastructure as Code

AI Governance & Observability

• LLMOps
• MLOps
• Model Governance
• AI Security & Guardrails
• LangSmith
• Arize
• Monitoring & Evaluation Frameworks

Qualifications

Relevant qualifications may include:

• Master's degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science or related discipline
• AWS Solutions Architect Professional
• AWS AI/ML Specialty
• Microsoft Azure AI Engineer
• Google Professional ML Engineer
• Executive AI / Machine Learning qualifications

If you're an AI Architect, Lead AI Architect, Head of AI Engineering, AI Platform Lead, Director of AI Engineering or senior AI technology leader with genuine production-scale experience,