Vice President – AI Engineer

1203 Barclays Global Serv. Cent; Pune District; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Barclays is seeking a Vice President - AI Engineer to design, build, and scale AI/ML solutions across multiple business units. You will mentor teams, shape architectural direction, and drive enterprise-grade reliability, security, and governance of AI platforms.

You will lead adoption of agentic AI, multi-agent orchestration, and modern MLOps pipelines, working with cloud services and containerized deployments in a large enterprise environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or related field.
• 12+ years software engineering or ML infrastructure experience.
• Proficiency in Python and Go/Java with production systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and scale AI/ML solutions across business units.
• Mentor engineering teams and shape technical direction.
• Ensure security, governance, and reliability of AI systems.
• Communicate architectures to senior leadership.

Skills

Python

Go/Java

LLM applications

Kubernetes

Docker

AWS

Distributed systems

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

FastAPI

LangGraph

vLLM

Bedrock/SageMaker

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Job Description

Purpose of the role To design, develop and improve software, utilising various engineering methodologies, that provides business, platform, and technology capabilities for our customers and colleagues.

Accountabilities

Development and delivery of high-quality software solutions by using industry aligned programming languages, frameworks, and tools.

Ensuring that code is scalable, maintainable, and optimized for performance.

Cross-functional collaboration with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define software requirements, devise solution strategies, and ensure seamless integration and alignment with business objectives.

Collaboration with peers, participate in code reviews, and promote a culture of code quality and knowledge sharing.

Stay informed of industry technology trends and innovations and actively contribute to the organization’s technology communities to foster a culture of technical excellence and growth.

Adherence to secure coding practices to mitigate vulnerabilities, protect sensitive data, and ensure secure software solutions.

Implementation of effective unit testing practices to ensure proper code design, readability, and reliability.

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 escape 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 Barclays as a Vice President - AI Engineer role, where you will serve as a senior engineer helping to drive adoption of state-of-the-art AI technologies.

You’ll use your expertise to design, build, and scale AI/ML solutions - from agentic AI systems and LLM applications to end-to-end MLOps pipelines - enabling the bank's success across multiple business units.

You will shape architectural decisions, mentor engineering teams, and ensure our AI solutions meet the demands of enterprise-grade reliability, security, and governance.

At Barclays, we don't just anticipate the future - we're creating it.

To be successful in this role, you should have below skills:

Bachelor's degree (or above) in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related discipline 12+ years software engineering experience or experience designing and building scalable ML infrastructure, model serving platforms, and end-to-end MLOps systems at enterprise scale Expert-level proficiency in Python (FastAPI, async patterns) and/or Go/Java, with demonstrable experience building production systems serving high-throughput, low-latency workloads Strong experience developing agentic AI systems and LLM applications including multi-agent orchestration, tool use, planning frameworks, and production deployment of multi-layered AI workflows at scale Deep technical knowledge of LLM finetuning, prompt engineering, RAG architectures, and modern agentic frameworks (Strands, LangGraph, Google ADK) with validated ability to architect and optimise agent-based solutions Hands-on experience with GenAI/LLM systems - prompt engineering, loop engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, model serving (vLLM), and OpenAI-compatible API surfaces Experience with AWS services - EC2/EKS, S3, IAM, RDS, and at least one AI service (Bedrock, SageMaker) Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes - containerising applications and deploying to orchestrated environments Experience with distributed systems architecture - microservices, cloud platforms, active-active replication, failover strategies, and data consistency patterns Proven ability to communicate complex technical architectures to senior leadership and cross-functional stakeholders

Some other highly valued skills may include below:

Experience building evaluation frameworks for agentic systems including agent benchmarking, reasoning traces, and monitoring observability for multi-step AI workflows in production

Experience in vector databases, knowledge graphs, semantic search, and memory systems for stateful agents with understanding of retrieval optimisation and context management

Experience building AI safety/guardrails systems - content filtering, prompt injection detection, PII redaction, toxicity detection

Knowledge of AI security frameworks - NIST AI RMF, MITRE ATLAS, OWASP LLM Top 10

Experience with model finetuning (LoRA, RLHF, supervised finetuning) for domain-specific SLMs

Knowledge of responsible AI practices, model governance, and security considerations for autonomous systems

Background in financial services - understanding of regulatory requirements, data residency, and compliance obligations

Experience with policy engines (OPA/Rego) and zero-trust identity models with OAuth2/OIDC (EntraID/Azure AD)

Experience with cost attribution and chargeback models for shared AI infrastructure platforms

This role is based in Bengaluru and Pune office.

Our Work Experience is the combination of everything that's unique about us: our culture, our core values, our company meetings, our commitment to sustainability, our recognition programs, but most importantly, it's our people.

Our employees are self-disciplined, hard working, curious, trustworthy, humble, and truthful. They make choices according to what is best for the team, they live for opportunities to collaborate and make a difference, and they make us the #1 Top Workplace in the area.