Head of AI Agent Engineering – Hands-On Lead

Glaxosmithkline; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

GlaxoSmithKline seeks an experienced AI Agent Engineering lead in the UK to own the agent layer of the agentic framework. You’ll manage the build pipeline, LLM integration, prompt-to-action engineering, and agent lifecycle while guiding a small team of engineers.

You’ll drive non-deterministic output evaluation, develop reusable components, and ensure compliance with AI security standards. This hands-on role balances architecture collaboration with coding, testing, and delivering

Qualifications

• 15+ years in cyber security or AI engineering in a regulated environment.
• Agent engineering depth — LLM integration, prompt-to-action engineering, multi-agent orchestration, tool and function calling, memory and state management, RAG retrieval, prompt and model version control and reusable agent components.
• Agent safety engineering — evaluation harnesses for non-deterministic behaviour, red-team testing, guardrails, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, containment and rollback.
• Building GenAI security use cases — alert triage automation, threat summarisation and automated investigation — from architecture specification to production, integrated cleanly with the AI platform layer.
• Applying binding AI security standards to every agent — tool-invocation control, identity binding and least-privilege scoping — and preparing handover packages for a managed service.

Responsibilities

• Own the agent layer: agent development pipeline, LLM integration, prompt-to-action engineering and agent lifecycle.
• Own agent evaluation and testing, including credible approaches to non-deterministic output.
• Build GenAI security use cases such as alert triage automation and threat summarisation.
• Develop reusable agent components that reduce effort on the next build.
• Lead the agent engineers building the agent layer, and keep at least a third of your own week on code.
• Run the two-week shadow period where the vendor's operators work your agents under supervision, and hold the go-live gate until their runbook survives a deliberately injected failure.
• Mentor the agent engineers and set the engineering standard for the agent layer by example — code review, evaluation discipline and documentation quality.
• Apply GxP and data integrity expectations to agents that touch validated systems or the records they produce.

Job description

GlaxoSmithKline seeks an experienced AI Agent Engineering lead in the UK to own the agent layer of the agentic framework. You’ll manage the build pipeline, LLM integration, prompt-to-action engineering, and agent lifecycle while guiding a small team of engineers.

You’ll drive non-deterministic output evaluation, develop reusable components, and ensure compliance with AI security standards. This hands-on role balances architecture collaboration with coding, testing, and delivering