Optima Partners on cord

Optima Partners

Senior AI Specialist

External position
Edinburgh, UK
Hiring internally for Optima Partners?
Consultancy · Data · Marketing and Advertising
Helping businesses deliver customer-centric transformation.
Posted
a month ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: AI Engineer
Experience level: Senior
Core skills considered: Artificial Intelligence, Python, SQL, APIs, API Testing
Other skills considered: Docker, CI/CD, Cloud Computing, Azure

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

We are looking for a Senior AI Specialist to design, build and deploy practical AI solutions that help clients transform business processes, improve decision-making and increase efficiency. With a strong focus on generative AI, agentic AI and retrieval-augmented generation, this role combines hands-on technical delivery with the ability to understand commercial challenges and turn them into scalable, robust solutions.

As part of Optima's growing AI capability, you will work closely with colleagues across data science, data engineering, consulting and client engagement to identify high-impact use cases and deliver AI-enabled solutions that embed effectively into clients' operating environments.


Responsibilities

  • Design, develop and deploy AI solutions, including LLM applications, RAG-based systems, intelligent automation workflows and agentic AI solutions.
  • Build and optimise end-to-end AI pipelines, APIs and services using Python, integrating with enterprise platforms, databases and third-party systems.
  • Work with clients and business stakeholders to identify high-impact use cases and translate requirements into scalable AI-driven solutions.
  • Evaluate and improve solution performance, accuracy, reliability, scalability, governance and operational effectiveness.
  • Contribute to accelerators, prototypes and proof-of-concept initiatives that demonstrate measurable business value.
  • Collaborate with Optima's wider community to embed AI-enabled thinking into business processes and delivery methodologies.
  • Support client workshops, knowledge sharing, training and AI adoption initiatives, acting as a trusted advisor on emerging AI capabilities.

Requirements

  • Experience designing, building or deploying AI applications, LLM solutions, RAG solutions, AI agents or intelligent automation workflows.
  • Strong Python and SQL skills, with experience using frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph or similar technologies.
  • Knowledge of vector databases, prompt engineering, API integration, AI orchestration platforms and cloud environments, with Azure experience preferred.
  • Familiarity with Docker, CI/CD, MLOps, enterprise system integration and AI governance principles would be advantageous.
  • Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to engage both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Commercial curiosity, a proactive mindset and a passion for emerging AI technologies and identifying opportunities to create business value.
Senior AI Specialist at Optima Partners
Position posted a month 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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