Why this opportunity stands out
Build and run a new enterprise AI platform in private wealth for a global consulting firm. Lead engineering delivery of agentic orchestration. £130k–£175k.
About the role
A global consulting firm is establishing a brand-new AI initiative inside its finance and private wealth practice and is hiring a Head of AI Engineering to lead the build from day one.
This is a build role. You will own the engineering strategy, set the technical bar, hire and lead the engineering organisation, and personally drive the technical delivery of agentic AI systems into a regulated, enterprise environment. The mandate is to move from concept to production-grade rollout with measured business outcomes and the resilience a regulated firm demands.
You will partner directly with the Head of AI Product, senior leaders across consulting, technology, risk and the wealth business, and offshore delivery teams. The work will touch every part of the agentic stack — orchestration, evaluation, governance, integration with core banking and CRM, and the human-in-the-loop controls a regulated firm demands.
## What you will own
* The engineering strategy, architecture and 24-month build plan for the firm's enterprise agentic platform in private wealth
* Technical delivery — architecture, build-vs-buy, vendor selection, integration patterns, deployment, observability, SRE and on-call
* Agentic orchestration at enterprise scale: agent design, tool-use frameworks, memory, retrieval, evaluation harnesses and safe-autonomy boundaries
* An engineering organisation spanning platform, applied science, data and MLOps
* The engineering relationship with risk, compliance, legal and information security from day one
* Operational outcomes: availability, latency, cost-to-serve, model and pipeline quality, and incident response
* Executive narrative: technical cases, investment proposals and board-level updates on engineering posture and risk
## What you will have done before
* Led technical delivery of AI or agentic systems in finance, private wealth, asset management, capital markets or a closely regulated enterprise
* Built and shipped agentic orchestration into production — LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen or equivalent; orchestration over tools, APIs and enterprise systems
* Designed and operated RAG and knowledge systems against proprietary financial data, with the evaluation discipline that implies
* Led engineers and applied scientists through a build, not just bought a vendor and parachuted
* Operated inside consulting, financial services or another matrixed, senior-stakeholder-heavy environment
* Made build-vs-buy calls and lived with the consequences
* Carried on-call, incident response and platform reliability accountability
## What success looks like in year one
* First production agentic workflows live with named private wealth teams, with SLOs, observability and incident response operating
* Architecture, governance and risk controls approved by the firm's AI, risk and information security forums
* A hiring plan delivered and a permanent engineering organisation in place
* A 24-month engineering roadmap signed off by the executive sponsor with funding committed
## Compensation
* £130,000 – £175,000 base, plus bonus and benefits commensurate with a global consulting firm
## Location
* London, hybrid. The role requires regular working time with senior stakeholders in the UK and offshore delivery teams.