Acorn on cord

Acorn

Lead AI Engineer

External position
Liverpool, UK
Hiring internally for Acorn?
Insurance
We deliver non-standard insurance for a non-standard world
Posted
2 months ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: AI Engineer
Experience level: Lead
Core skills considered: Artificial Intelligence, Azure, Terraform
Other skills considered: Helm, APIs, REST

Logistics

Base salary: £60K - £60K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Responsibilities

  • Help lead AI strategy at Acorn alongside the Head of AI Services: shape direction, roadmap and the engineering vision for the function.
  • Own a substantial share of the AI platform infrastructure: Azure, AKS, Terraform, Helm, Azure Pipelines. Lead its evolution, reliability and operational health.
  • Lead engineering practice across AI Services: code review, testing, source control hygiene, deployment patterns, observability.
  • Set and uphold observability, performance and governance standards for AI solutions across the business: DPIAs, model documentation, audit trails, evaluation harnesses.
  • Integrate APIs cleanly: REST and webhook patterns, OpenAPI, authentication, retry / backoff, contract testing.
  • Partner with the Conversational AI workstream to integrate internal APIs with Chat and Voice tooling (Boost.ai, ElevenLabs, comparable platforms).
  • Lead evaluation of new platforms, frameworks and AI tooling; drive adoption decisions for the function.
  • Act as technical escalation point for AI engineers across the wider function.
  • Run cross-team forums to share patterns, new tooling and engineering practice.
  • Lead expansion of AI capability into new business domains as the AI estate grows.
  • Provide technical direction and mentorship to engineers across teams; raise the engineering bar.
  • Operate within a regulated AI governance model: DPIAs, model documentation, observability, human-in-the-loop where appropriate.

What we're looking for:

  • Strong production engineering track record - software, AI or ML at scale, in environments where reliability matters. Real software development practice, not just AI tinkering.
  • Working knowledge of LLM application patterns: RAG, structured extraction, evals, prompt and context engineering, agentic workflows.
  • Comfort integrating APIs cleanly - REST / webhook, OpenAPI, authentication patterns, retry / backoff, contract testing. You understand how production integrations actually fall over.
  • Conversational AI awareness - familiarity with Boost.ai, ElevenLabs or comparable voice / chat platforms, and how to wire them up to internal systems sensibly.
  • DevOps fluency: Azure (essential), AKS, Helm, Terraform, Azure Pipelines strongly preferred. You should be comfortable across the whole stack rather than purely application-layer.
  • Track record of putting observability, governance and audit story in place at scale.
  • Awareness of the constraints of regulated environments: data residency, auditability, ZDR, model risk - design with them in mind from the start.
  • Track record of mentoring engineers across teams and shaping engineering culture.
  • Comfortable making and defending architecture / tooling calls; comfortable being challenged.
  • Senior enough to operate as a credible technical co-owner of the AI platform alongside the Head of AI Services.

Company Benefits

Wellbeing
  • Enhanced Annual Leave entitlement starting at 31 days and potentially increasing to 35 days per year depending on grade & length of service (including bank holidays)
  • Enhanced paternity pay and 16 weeks full maternity pay.
  • Colleague Assistance programme offers a suite of wellbeing services such as:
  • 6 Free Counselling sessions per year
  • Unlimited access to a telephone councillor 24/7
  • Access to a free 4-week programme of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) with a trained therapist mentor.
  • Network of internal qualified mental health first aiders are available to provide support to colleagues.
Financial
  • A core level of life assurance with the option to increase cover via salary sacrifice and add your spouse/partner
  • Ability to access your earnings before payday via Dayforce Wallet.
  • Company pension scheme
  • Refer a friend scheme with a £250 bonus for every colleague recommended on passing their probation period.
  • Access to a flexible benefits platform including an annual flex pot allowance to spend on over 15 benefits of your choice.
  • Ability to give back. You can opt into donating money to charity to climate positive organisations directly from your salary.
Reward, Recognition and Culture
  • Long Service Award paid on 5, 10- and 15-years’ service
  • A reward and recognition hub to celebrate and reward colleagues and peers.
  • Consistent and engaging company events including company awards, competitions and charity fundraisers.
  • Budgets for department leaders to use for social and engagement events.
Lead AI Engineer at Acorn
Position posted 2 months ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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