Financial Conduct Authority on cord

Financial Conduct Authority

Head of Agentic AI and Data Science Research

External position
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 Data
Experience level: Senior, Lead, Leadership
Core skills considered: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Analysis, Data Modeling, Data Pipelines
Other skills considered: Data Protection, Data Security, Privacy, Technical Direction

Logistics

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

Job Description

The Head of Agentic AI and Data Science Research leads the FCA's capability at the frontier of applied AI, ensuring the organisation not only adopts emerging technologies but understands, shapes and governs them in a way that supports its public interest objectives.

Reporting to the Director of Intelligence & Digital, this role is the research and design engine for AI. It provides strategic leadership for AI research, model governance, data science capability, and horizon scanning. It is responsible for identifying how emerging AI technologies can be applied safely, ethically and proportionately to support better regulation, enhance regulatory intelligence, combat financial crime and improve organisational effectiveness.

The role owns the FCA's medium and longer-term AI agenda, translating emerging opportunities and risks into actionable strategies, governance frameworks and capability roadmaps. It also leads the FCA Data Science Profession and provides technical thought leadership to senior decision-makers across the organisation and wider regulatory, and technology stakeholder communities.

Working closely with AI Product Delivery and AI Security & Technology Operations, the role ensures clear accountability across strategy, research, governance, delivery and operations, without duplication of responsibility.


Key Responsibilities

  • Lead the FCA's Agentic AI and Data Science Research function, setting the strategic direction for AI research, advanced analytics and emerging technologies
  • Define and shape the FCA's medium and long-term approach to AI and Data Science, ensuring emerging technologies support smarter regulation, regulatory intelligence, financial crime reduction and organisational effectiveness
  • Establish and maintain the FCA's AI governance and research ethics framework, providing the standards, controls and technical authority required for the safe, ethical and proportionate use of AI and advanced analytics
  • Develop and maintain the FCA's medium and long-term AI and Data Science roadmap, translating research, horizon scanning, and emerging technologies into future organisational capability and priorities
  • Lead the FCA's horizon scanning and AI intelligence capability, identifying emerging opportunities and risks, and translating them into strategic recommendations, policy insight and investment priorities
  • Lead the FCA's Data Science Profession; provide specialist AI and Data Science expertise, building professional standards, organisational readiness, and thought leadership while representing the FCA across regulatory, technology, and stakeholder communities
  • Developing and delivering a long-term strategy for the department, aligning to broader divisional and organisational strategies
  • Leading on performance, capability and culture within the department, with a strong focus on operational excellence
  • Delivering through others by relying on coaching, influencing and negotiating skills with a range of internal and external stakeholders
  • Building a strong and inclusive directorate that attracts and develop diverse talent

Minimum

  • Significant experience of managing and influencing senior stakeholders internally and externally
  • Experience leading specialist technical, analytical, AI, data science or comparable multidisciplinary teams within a complex organisation
  • Strong understanding of AI, machine learning, data science, and advanced analytics, including associated opportunities, limitations and risks
  • Experience of developing governance frameworks, standards, operating models or strategic roadmaps supporting the safe, ethical, and proportionate use of AI or advanced analytics
  • Proven ability to translate complex technological developments into practical organisational outcomes, priorities, and investment decisions

Essential

  • Experience developing strategic, tactical, and ethical approaches for deploying AI and advanced analytics in support of organisational objectives
  • Proven horizon-scanning capability and ability to convert emerging technological developments into actionable strategies, and business roadmaps
  • Experience establishing AI governance, model assurance, research ethics or responsible AI frameworks.
  • Ability to operate credibly as a senior technical adviser to executive and board-level stakeholders.
  • Exemplary communication, influencing, and stakeholder management skill
  • Experience of role modelling strong leadership behaviours in line with organisational values
  • The ability to inclusively lead a group of talented individuals with a wide variety of professional expertise, experience, and backgrounds
  • An open and flexible management style and the ability to communicate effectively to a wide-ranging audience with different skills and perspectives

Desirable

  • Advanced understanding of agentic AI, multi-agent systems, and emerging frontier AI technologies.
  • Experience within financial services, regulation or another highly regulated environment.
  • Evidence of recognised thought leadership within AI, data science, or advanced analytics.
  • Experience representing an organisation externally on AI strategy, governance, or innovation topics.
  • Familiarity with commercially available agentic AI platforms and tooling.

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 Agentic AI and Data Science Research at Financial Conduct Authority
Position posted a week ago

Talk directly
to who's hiring

cord intros you to the companies worth joining, from seed to enterprise.

Everything you need to find work

Surface every relevant position, direct message the people hiring and manage all your applications in one place.

Get started

Every position in one place

We index the web for open positions that might be relevant to you and bring them all in one place.

Positions you might like split into tabs based on their type

Direct messaging

No more CV blackholes. Message people hiring directly and see their activity live on cord.

A sent message to a hiring manager
A board of positions in different stages

Application management

Manage all your applications and interviews in one place.

Advanced insights

Know your worth and see how you compare with other applicants.

Visualisation of a profile match score for a position and score comparison with other applicants

Direct.
Transparent.
Human.

On cord you can message people hiring directly, see when they were last active, how responsive they are and access transparent information that you wouldn't be able to find anywhere else.

Photos people at Starling BankPhotos people at Starling BankPhotos people at Starling BankPhotos people at Starling BankPhotos people at Starling Bank
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
Alex Yeates on cord
Message Alex Yeates at Starling Bank
Typically responds in an hour

What people are saying

2,000+

users joining every week

Oliver on cord

Oliver

Software Engineering Consultant
It's really easy to use, has a solid selection of jobs, and makes it helpful to direct message companies. The platform seems to offer a good range of opportunities while keeping the process simple and convenient.
November, 2025
David on cord

David

Lead Software Engineer
The platform allows you to create a professional CV, making the setup process simple and polished. The internal chat also provides an easy way to directly contact hiring companies, which makes communication much more efficient.
November, 2025
40,000+

open positions

Nicolae on cord

Nicolae

Senior Full Stack Developer
It is a great platform if you are looking for a job. It makes the search process straight forward and gives you access to solid opportunities.
November, 2025
3 million+

messages exchanged so far

Nicolae on cord

Nicolae

Senior Full Stack Developer
It is a great platform if you are looking for a job. It makes the search process straight forward and gives you access to solid opportunities.
November, 2025
80.03%

response rate from companies

Aarambha on cord

Aarambha

Associate Software Engineer
Absolutely amazing idea, the ability to see which recruiters are active makes finding opportunities very quick. There is a form of transparency built into the website that lacks in any other job searching platform.
August, 2025
Adam on cord

Adam

Senior Engineer
cord was great. Clean UI, easy to browse, and the data feature made it a breeze to quickly check whether my profile would match up well with a particular role. The messaging system made it easy to approach companies but also filter out unwanted requests.
August, 2025
4.6

score on Trustpilot

Talk directly to the people that matter

Join the hundred of thousands of people using cord to find work

Get started
 on cord
 on cord
 on cord
 on cord
 on cord
+490 joined last week
Moved to your Not right positions