Kyndryl on cord

Kyndryl

Associate Director

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Kyndryl?
Internet
We design, build, manage and modernize the mission-critical technology systems that the world depends on every day.
Posted
2 weeks ago
Checked
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2 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Account Director
Experience level: Lead, Leadership
Core skills considered: Artificial Intelligence, Business Analysis
Other skills considered: Building Teams, Business development

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

As Associate Director you lead customer innovation engagements end to end - from challenge framing and executive workshops through prototype direction, evidence and the decision that follows. You are the customer's strategic contact throughout and a trusted advisor to their senior leadership, bridging the gap between business problems, research insight and tangible concepts people can test.

This is a design-leadership and consulting role, not an engineering one. Practical AI fluency is essential - a point of view on how AI reshapes what we design, and enough understanding of agentic systems to direct credible prototypes - but you do not need to be the deepest engineer in the room. You are composed in ambiguity, create just enough structure to move fast and help a complementary team do its best work.


What you will own

  • The customer journey. Shape the brief, engagement arc and success measures with the customer and account team; connect immersion, co-design, workshops, build, test and post-Lab follow-through.
  • Executive momentum. Lead CIOs, CTOs, COOs and their leadership teams through ambiguity, constructive challenge and the decisions required to move.
  • The opportunity frame. Translate business priorities, user needs and operational realities into a precise opportunity, a credible value hypothesis and an actionable design challenge.
  • The human-AI system. Define what people, agents and systems each know, decide and do - handoffs, exceptions, control and accountability.
  • The build and the test. Set fidelity, medium and AI approach; direct creative technologists, designers, researchers and engineers through focused build cycles; define the evidence before the test using research, realistic scenarios, synthetic personas and system evaluation.
  • The decision. Connect challenge, evidence and recommendation to an owned next step - sprint, pilot, transformation initiative or deliberate stop.
  • What repeats. Turn validated work into reusable methods, patterns, components, prompts, agent states, policies, evaluation sets and reference builds.
  • The practice. Build complementary strengths across design, consulting, AI and business strategy rather than one profile; set the quality bar and coach; keep roughly 10 percent of capacity for moonshots in human-AI collaboration, embodied AI and adaptive interfaces.

You own the whole engagement, not every artifact: its intellectual and experiential quality, the senior customer relationship and the path from Lab activity to durable business value.

  • You own engagement architecture and outcomes. Customer journey, design direction, prioritization, prototype intent, validation plan, executive decision moments and the post-Lab path.
  • The Senior Creative Technologist owns hands-on making. Assigned prototypes, interaction artifacts, technical exploration, testing evidence and implementation-ready handoff, working to direction from you and the Director. On smaller engagements they carry the day-to-day customer relationship within that direction.
  • Engineering, account and Lab operations own their domains. Engineering leads own production architecture, security, integration and deployment; you connect business intent and the intended experience to technical delivery. Account, industry and alliance teams bring opportunity context, domain expertise, relationships and commercial follow-through. Scheduling, hospitality, AV, safety and equipment sit with Lab operations.

Engagements end with evidence and an owned executive decision, not just satisfaction; what is built traces to a customer priority and a plausible source of value; validated opportunities move into funded sprints, pilots or programs; patterns and assets compound across Lab teams, industries and customers.


What you bring Minimum qualifications

  • Education. Bachelor's degree in design, HCI, business, engineering, computer science, architecture or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
  • Experience. 10+ years in design, innovation or consulting, including 3+ years leading multidisciplinary teams and owning senior customer or executive relationships.
  • Portfolio. Case studies of engagements you led end to end: the challenge, how you framed it, what was prototyped and tested, and the decision or outcome it produced.
  • Language. Business-level fluency in English.

You will thrive here if you have

  • Executive presence and facilitation. Confidence leading senior customers through ambiguity, co-design, constructive challenge and consequential decisions.
  • Business acumen and consulting judgment. The ability to read enterprise priorities, frame opportunity and connect value, feasibility and a practical route to action - going beyond strategy into live implementation.
  • Human-centered design leadership. Significant experience leading service, product, experience or innovation work from research and framing through validation and outcome.
  • End-to-end engagement leadership. Experience shaping and running complex customer workshops, Lab engagements or consulting programs, not just facilitating isolated sessions.
  • AI opportunity fluency. Enough understanding of generative and agentic systems to spot meaningful possibilities, challenge assumptions and direct credible prototypes.
  • Multidisciplinary direction. Experience aligning designers, creative technologists, researchers, engineers, industry experts and commercial teams around one outcome, and the curiosity to keep learning without a fixed playbook.

Preferred qualifications

  • Advanced degree. Master's degree or MBA in design, HCI, innovation, business or a related field.
  • Consultancy or lab background. Time in a design consultancy, innovation lab, product studio or creative agency, repeatedly moving ambiguous customer challenges into actionable opportunities.
  • Global and cross-industry exposure. Senior stakeholders across sectors such as financial services, insurance, manufacturing, retail, travel or government, ideally in more than one geography.
  • Working toolkit. Figma, FigJam or Miro; workshop and design-sprint facilitation methods; generative AI tools for research synthesis and concept exploration.
  • Prototype and governance familiarity. Digital, spatial or physical prototyping and the enterprise considerations around responsible AI adoption - governance, risk and model evaluation.
  • Business development. Experience shaping proposals, pitches and thought leadership with account and industry teams.
  • Mobility. Willingness to travel to customer sites and Lab locations as engagements require.
Associate Director at Kyndryl
Position posted 2 weeks 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
Alex Yeates on cord
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