Prudential's purpose is to be partners for every life and protectors for every future. Our purpose encourages everything we do by creating a culture in which diversity is celebrated and inclusion assured, for our people, customers, and partners. We provide a platform for our people to do their best work and make an impact to the business, and we support our people's career ambitions. We pledge to make Prudential a place where you can Connect, Grow, and Succeed.
We are looking for an experienced AI Data Engineering Lead to define and lead the engineering of enterprise-scale data platforms and data products that power Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Generative AI and advanced analytics.
This individual will build the organisation's AI-ready data foundation by bringing together modern data engineering, cloud platforms, batch and real-time processing, unstructured data, vector and semantic technologies, data governance, and AI/ML engineering practices.
The role requires a senior technology leader with 15+ years of experience, strong hands-on technical depth, architecture capability, and a proven ability to lead engineering teams and deliver complex data platforms at enterprise scale.
Key Responsibilities
AI Data Engineering Strategy & Architecture
- Define the enterprise AI Data Engineering strategy, architecture and engineering standards.
- Design scalable data architectures supporting AI/ML, GenAI, LLM, analytics and enterprise data products.
- Establish reusable architectural patterns for structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.
- Define patterns for data lakes, lakehouse architectures, data warehouses, streaming platforms, vector databases and AI knowledge layers.
- Drive architectural decisions covering performance, scalability, resiliency, security and cost.
AI-Ready Data Platforms
- Lead engineering of data platforms providing trusted and reusable data for ML models, LLMs, AI agents and GenAI applications.
- Build ingestion and transformation frameworks for data from databases, APIs, documents, events, logs and enterprise applications.
- Establish pipelines for batch, near-real-time and streaming data processing.
- Drive automated data validation, quality controls, metadata management and lineage.
- Establish engineering approaches for preparing text, documents, images and other unstructured data for AI consumption.
GenAI & LLM Data Engineering
- Provide technical leadership for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), document ingestion, parsing, chunking and enrichment.
- Lead embedding generation and management, vector and hybrid search, semantic retrieval and reranking.
- Design knowledge repositories, metadata and access-control filtering, and enterprise search integration.
- Create data pipelines for LLM evaluation, AI grounding, authorised retrieval, fine-tuning where applicable, and AI agents.
- Understand how poor retrieval, incomplete or stale data, weak metadata and inappropriate chunking affect enterprise AI reliability.
Modern Data Engineering
- Provide leadership across ETL/ELT, distributed processing, lakehouse and data warehouse architectures, streaming, event-driven design, data APIs and data services.
- Drive data modelling, data contracts, observability, quality engineering, lineage and metadata management.
- Embed Infrastructure-as-Code, CI/CD, DevOps and DataOps practices in the engineering lifecycle.
- Improve reusability, automation, reliability and developer productivity through common frameworks and standards.
Cloud & Technology Platforms
- Demonstrate significant expertise across modern cloud and data platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Azure Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Lake Storage, Snowflake and Databricks.
- Bring strong capability in Python, SQL, Apache Spark/PySpark, Kafka, Delta Lake, Airflow and dbt.
- Apply AI and GenAI data technologies including Azure AI Search, vector databases, embedding models, semantic search, RAG frameworks, MLflow and feature stores.
- Experience with Azure OpenAI, enterprise LLM platforms and agent architectures is highly valuable. Deep expertise is expected across a relevant enterprise-scale stack, rather than every technology listed.
Data Governance, Security & Responsible AI
- Embed data governance, privacy, security and regulatory controls into data engineering architecture.
- Implement appropriate access controls for sensitive and confidential information.
- Ensure lineage, traceability and auditability across AI data pipelines.
- Ensure AI solutions retrieve and process only appropriately authorised data.
- Partner with Cybersecurity, Risk, Compliance, Data Governance and AI Governance teams, while promoting Responsible AI engineering practices.
- Experience handling PII, sensitive customer information, data residency and regulatory requirements is highly valuable.
Data Quality & Observability
- Define enterprise standards for AI data quality and automated