AI Ops Platform Engineer

Job Description

Purpose of the role

To lead and manage engineering teams, providing technical guidance, mentorship, and support to ensure the delivery of high-quality software solutions, driving technical excellence, fostering a culture of innovation, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to align technical decisions with business objectives.

Accountabilities

• Lead engineering teams effectively, fostering a collaborative and high-performance culture to achieve project goals and meet organizational objectives.
• Oversee timelines, team allocation, risk management and task prioritization to ensure the successful delivery of solutions within scope, time, and budget.
• Mentor and support team members' professional growth, conduct performance reviews, provide actionable feedback, and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Evaluation and enhancement of engineering processes, tools, and methodologies to increase efficiency, streamline workflows, and optimize team productivity.
• Collaboration with business partners, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions and ensure a cohesive approach to product development.
• Enforcement of technology standards, facilitate peer reviews, and implement robust testing practices to ensure the delivery of high-quality solutions.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L - Listen and be authentic, E - Energise and inspire, A - Align across the enterprise, D - Develop others..
• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship - our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset - to Empower, Challenge and Drive - the operating manual for how we behave.

Join us as an AI Ops Engineer, to build and run an enterprise AI Factory within our Card Merchant Services organisation, enabling AI-driven change across the merchant payments lifecycle.

This role focuses on acquiring, risk and fraud, and merchant servicing, delivering a secure, scalable, and well-governed AI platform that operates effectively in a highly regulated payments environment. You will be accountable for the end-to-end operationalisation of AI, spanning model, prompt, and agent lifecycles; deployment and monitoring; guardrails; and cost optimisation, ensuring AI solutions are production-ready, auditable, compliant, and scalable across merchant payment use cases.

You will be accountable for the end-to-end engineering of GenAI and ML platforms, embedding governance, observability and operational resilience by design, while enabling teams to deploy and run AI solutions with clarity, assurance and accountability at scale.

To be successful as an AI Ops Platform Engineer, you should have experience with:

• Supporting production-scale LLMOps / AgentOps lifecycles, including CI/CD for models, prompts and agents, versioning, structured evaluation, controlled releases, and monitoring of drift, hallucination and agent behaviour.
• Contributing to the build and operation of cloud-based AI platforms on AWS, including services such as Amazon Bedrock and agent orchestration capabilities, alongside solid Python development skills and an understanding of secure API and microservices design.
• Supporting AI platforms with embedded governance approaches, including policy-as-code, guardrails, alignment to model risk frameworks, and maintaining lifecycle traceability with audit-ready evidence.
• Applying observability and reliability practices to AI platforms, including contributing to service level measures and monitoring latency, cost, quality and failure modes, supported by tools such as CloudWatch and OpenTelemetry.
• Understanding of AI cost and performance considerations, including working with token usage, model selection, caching approaches, and balancing trade-offs between latency, cost and output quality.

Some other highly valued skills may include:

• Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and vector database implementation, with practical experience using technologies such as OpenSearch, FAISS or similar to support scalable, production-ready retrieval workflows.
• Data pipeline engineering, building and operating AI-ready pipelines using AWS Glue, S3 and related services to support model training, inference and evaluation.
• Advanced observability and reliability engineering, including experience with CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry and established production resilience patterns for AI workloads in critical banking systems.

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen, strategic thinking, and digital and technology capability, as well as role-specific technical skills.

This role will be based in London.

The successful candidate will be based in London. Our offices are located at 1 Churchill Place and 7 Westferry Circus (new BPL office). We support a hybrid working pattern with 3 days per week office-based presence expected.

Barclays’ payments acceptance business provides critical infrastructure to the UK economy, processing billions of pounds of payments annually for both small businesses and domestic and international corporate clients.

In April 2025, we announced a long-term partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to grow and transform the payments acceptance business by broadening the range of services offered, enhancing the experience for both existing and prospective clients. Leveraging extensive client relationships and deep experience of UK payments, we will create an environment of continuous innovation - activated by Brookfield’s global private equity expertise in payments, technology, operational transformation and corporate carve-outs - to ensure the business is strategically positioned for long-term growth.

Barclays will invest approximately £400m in the new business, the majority of which will be incurred during the first three years. Performance-linked incentives will drive greater alignment between the partners, underpinning the long-term commitment to the transformation. Barclays and Brookfield will work to create a standalone entity over time, continuing to use the Barclaycard Payments (BPL) brand and acting as the sole payments’ acceptance services provider to Barclays’ clients for a minimum of ten years.

For more information on our partnership with Brookfield, please visit Barclays.com.