Lead AI Architect - Generative AI & Governance Leader

National Energy System Operator (NESO); Warwick; Hybrid; GBP 75,000 - 85,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible benefits programme

Hybrid working from office & home

Health and protection benefits

Job summary

National Energy System Operator (NESO) seeks an experienced AI Architect to lead end-to-end AI/ML and agentic solution design, leveraging Azure as the primary platform. The role emphasizes governance, security, and compliance, with responsibility for roadmaps, workshops, and scalable, trustworthy deployments.

The candidate will work across Strategy & Architecture, collaborating with stakeholders to translate ambitious ideas into measurable outcomes, and mentor teams on MLOps/LLMOps practices for

Qualifications

• Proven experience architecting and deploying AI/ML and agentic solutions, with a strong focus on generative AI in production environments.
• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure as the primary cloud platform, including Azure AI Foundry, Azure Machine Learning, Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Search.

Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end design and architecture of AI, generative AI and agentic solutions from concept to production, developing high and low level design blueprints and driving technical implementation.
• Define the target AI architecture and reference patterns across the AI estate – spanning custom solutions, AI capabilities embedded in SaaS applications, and third-party AI services – making informed build-versus-buy and integration decisions, with Microsoft Azure as the primary delivery platform.
• Partner with stakeholders across the business to translate ambitious ideas into production-ready features and measurable outcomes.
• Ensure AI solutions are scalable, secure, resilient and compliant with relevant industry and regulatory standards.
• Establish evaluation and monitoring frameworks (including evaluation-driven development) so that AI solutions remain robust, accurate, observable and trustworthy in production.
• Embed AI governance and Responsible AI practices, defining policies for data management, model transparency, fairness, content safety and regulatory compliance.
• Serve as the technical subject-matter expert for AI solution architecture and implementation across the organisation.
• Develop AI implementation roadmaps, validate architectural designs and lead architecture workshops and technical discovery sessions.
• Guide the development of MLOps and LLMOps pipelines for continuous training, testing, deployment and monitoring in cloud environments, and oversee infrastructure decisions to guarantee scalability, security and maintainability.
• Support delivery teams, uphold architectural standards, and document solutions, lessons learned and reusable patterns.
• Stay current with AI trends, technologies and the competitive landscape, and bring emerging practices into the organisation.

Skills

AI architecture

Azure cloud

Python

LLMOps

MLOps

AI governance

Stakeholder mgmt

Security & IAM

Leadership

Mentoring

Tools

Azure AI Foundry

Azure Machine Learning

Azure OpenAI

Azure AI Search

LangChain

Semantic Kernel

Microsoft Agent Framework

Hugging Face

Job description

National Energy System Operator (NESO) seeks an experienced AI Architect to lead end-to-end AI/ML and agentic solution design, leveraging Azure as the primary platform. The role emphasizes governance, security, and compliance, with responsibility for roadmaps, workshops, and scalable, trustworthy deployments.

The candidate will work across Strategy & Architecture, collaborating with stakeholders to translate ambitious ideas into measurable outcomes, and mentor teams on MLOps/LLMOps practices for