Financial Conduct Authority on cord

Financial Conduct Authority

Head of Department: AI & Technology Security Operations

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Financial Conduct Authority?
Politics/Policy · Finance
We aim to make markets work well – for individuals, for business, large and small, and for the economy as a whole.
Posted
a week ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
6 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Head of Engineering
Experience level: Senior, Lead, Leadership
Core skills considered: Cyber Security, Cloud Computing
Other skills considered: Stakeholder Management

Logistics

Base salary: £140K - £190K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We have an exciting opportunity for a permanent Head of AI & Technology Security Operations. This role is designed for an experienced manager, senior technical specialist, or existing Head of Department with proven experience of leading teams and operating at scale in a rapidly evolving digital and AI-driven operating environment. The successful candidate will strengthen their strategic and operational leadership while overseeing high-tempo, service-critical digital and AI operations.

The Head of AI & Technology Security Operations is accountable for ensuring that the FCA's technology estate - including rapidly expanding AI capabilities - is robust, secure, and able to withstand, detect, and recover from disruption, failure, or exploitation.

The role brings together operational resilience, infrastructure governance, supplier oversight, and enterprise technology and AI-specific vulnerability management, ensuring that both traditional infrastructure and AI-enabled systems are designed, operated, and governed to remain safe, dependable, and trustworthy under stress.

Working in close collaboration with C&IR (Cyber and Information Resilience), this HoD plays a critical leadership role in implementing and managing the technology controls needed to anticipate and mitigate AI-driven risks, including model vulnerabilities, upstream dependency risks, data poisoning, adversarial attacks, and control failures arising from increased autonomy and scale.

This role will be responsible for leading, motivating and directing the department (~70FTE) across London, Leeds, & Edinburgh; and managing the FCA's critical Digital and AI systems, including AI live service, Service Desk, Incident Management, Cyber Security Operations and Supplier Management.

This is a fantastic development opportunity which will help to build expertise, experience and career skills in a senior, challenging and highly visible role.

The role will be reporting to the Chief Information Officer, and sit in the wider Data, Technology, and Innovation Division.


Key Responsibilities

  • Leading the development and operation of the FCA's AI vulnerability and threat management capability, identifying and mitigating risks linked to AI model weaknesses, adversarial threats, automation and agentic AI systems.
  • Establishing clear frameworks and controls for the safe deployment of AI, including human oversight, monitoring, explainability, version control, containment and safe shutdown mechanisms.
  • Maintaining effective AI governance, including ownership, inventory management, risk classification and oversight of AI-enabled services across the organisation.
  • Acting as accountable owner for technology and AI risk, including control design, testing, assurance activity and risk acceptance decisions.
  • Providing clear, metrics-led reporting to senior committees and Board-level forums on risk posture, emerging threats, control effectiveness and material gaps.
  • Overseeing critical third-party and AI supply chain dependencies, including cloud platforms, AI model providers, managed services and data sources.
  • Ensuring supplier, concentration and substitution risks are understood, monitored and managed effectively.
  • Owning technology continuity strategies across data, digital and AI services, ensuring critical services can withstand disruption, degrade safely and recover effectively.
  • Overseeing scenario testing, failover design, recovery validation and core service operations, including incident, problem and change management.
  • Leading and developing multidisciplinary teams across technology risk, AI operations, supplier management, continuity and live service operations.
  • Building strong capability, clear accountability and a culture where secure, resilient and dependable systems are a shared responsibility.
  • Representing the FCA externally with government, regulators, industry bodies and standards organisations on technology, AI and operational resilience.
  • Managing team budget, headcount, resources and IT supplier spend of approximately A380m.
  • Championing innovation, continuous improvement and the safe adoption of emerging technologies to strengthen resilience, efficiency and value for money.

This is a high-profile leadership role with enterprise-scale accountability, operating at the intersection of AI, cyber, technology, supplier and operational risk, with a direct contribution to the FCA's regulatory credibility and public trust.


Skills/Experience Required

Minimum

  • Hands on experience, however recent, with AI or agentic AI technologies.
  • Familiarity with UK regulatory frameworks relating to operational resilience, critical third parties, cyber resilience, and AI governance.
  • Experience within financial services, government, regulatory, or other highly regulated environments

Essential

  • Strong stakeholder management, capable of engaging with and developing strong trusting relationships with stakeholders from across a business organisation and at senior levels, as well as third parties.
  • Evidence of managing supplier relationships across a complex supplier and contract environment
  • Knowledge of NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, ISO 27001, DORA, or similar frameworks.
  • An ability to manage and control risk, embed good practice, and drive change where necessary.
  • In-depth working knowledge of multiple domains, including Engineering, DevOps, AI, Cyber Security and Cloud technology platforms.
  • Experience of driving change and process efficiency/improvements, delivering value for money and innovation.
  • Ability to inclusively lead a large group of talented individuals with a wide variety of professional expertise, experience, and backgrounds.

Company Benefits

  • 28 days holiday per year plus bank holidays
  • Private healthcare with Bupa
  • A non-contributory Pension of at least 8% of basic salary each month (there are several contribution levels that increase depending on your age – up to 12% a month once you reach age 35)
  • Life assurance of eight times your basic salary
  • Income protection
Head of Department: AI & Technology Security Operations at Financial Conduct Authority
Position posted a week 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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