Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering - AI Platform, Financial Services | Central London | £100,000-140,000

A growing technology business serving financial services firms is building a platform that helps investment professionals use AI reliably in their day-to-day work. The company has strong backing and an established client base across the sector. They're hiring a Head of Engineering to take ownership of the platform's architecture and build out a UK engineering function.

The role: A senior, first-of-its-kind engineering hire in the UK, working alongside an existing engineering team based overseas and building out a UK team across ML, front/back end, cloud and security. Full ownership of architecture, engineering standards, and security posture.

Tech required:

• Core stack: JVM and Python - comfortable across both, not screened on a specific framework
• Architecture: service boundary design based on data ownership; separation between core transactional systems and AI/ML components; multi-tenant design for a platform holding sensitive financial data
• AI/ML engineering: agentic workflows, retrieval quality (RAG and graph-backed retrieval), structured evaluation of AI outputs before release
• AI tooling (good to have): LangGraph, MCP, schema-first contract governance
• Infrastructure: AWS at scale, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code
• Engineering discipline: CI/CD, automated testing, static analysis, code review, release discipline
• Security: platform security architecture, compliance readiness for industry-standard certifications, enterprise client security reviews, experience with regulated-buyer diligence

Candidate profile:

• Has owned architecture for a multi-tenant enterprise platform
• 5+ years leading engineering teams, including across multiple locations
• Experience building production LLM or agentic AI systems
• Track record of raising engineering standards and driving adoption

Background in financial services or another regulated industry a plus.

Oscar Associates (UK) Limited is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.

To understand more about what we do with your data please review our privacy policy in the privacy section of the Oscar website.