Senior AI Systems Architect & Governance Lead

The Citation Group; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 42,000 - 82,000; Full time

Job summary

The Citation Group seeks an AI Architect to lead the design and governance of our AI systems across a five-layer platform. You will drive architecture decisions, enable secure, cost-aware deployments, and collaborate with Product, Security, and Delivery to maintain high standards.

This role reports into the AI/Data architecture function. You will shape guardrails, evaluation methods, and vendor assessments while aligning with ISO 27001 and data protection requirements, ensuring scalable,

Qualifications

• 6+ years in software, data, or platform engineering/architecture roles with hands-on AI production experience.
• Experience choosing between closed frontier models and open-weight/self-hosted models.
• Ability to model AI unit economics including token pricing, routing, caching, and context engineering.
• Familiarity with AWS AI services and multi-model patterns.
• Understanding of data protection laws and information security standards as they apply to AI.

Responsibilities

• Own the design patterns for AI systems, including retrieval/grounding, agent orchestration, tool-calling, prompts, guardrails and routing logic.
• Document decisions in architecture decision records for Engineering and Product to build against.
• Maintain an evidence-based framework for choosing model types and apply it per workload.
• Assess data readiness for AI initiatives, flag readiness issues early.
• Review proposals and Statements of Work with partner teams, guiding AI design elements.
• Define scope and success criteria for AI spikes/POCs and evaluate vendor claims against delivery constraints.
• Set standards for monitoring and evaluating AI systems, including offline/online evaluation and incident response.
• Bring Security into AI initiatives and ensure alignment with ISO 27001 and data protection laws.

Skills

AI architecture

Model selection

Cost modeling

Security & compliance

AWS AI services

Tools

AWS AI services

Job description

The Citation Group seeks an AI Architect to lead the design and governance of our AI systems across a five-layer platform. You will drive architecture decisions, enable secure, cost-aware deployments, and collaborate with Product, Security, and Delivery to maintain high standards.

This role reports into the AI/Data architecture function. You will shape guardrails, evaluation methods, and vendor assessments while aligning with ISO 27001 and data protection requirements, ensuring scalable,