Sword Group on cord

Sword Group

AI Solution Architect

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Sword Group?
Consultancy · Data
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, APIs, Python, REST
Other skills considered: Git, CI/CD, Kubernetes, 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

The AI Solution Architect is responsible for designing and governing AI, Data and Automation solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes for customers. The role bridges business strategy and technical implementation, translating customer challenges into scalable, secure and commercially viable solutions.

Working across pre-sales, delivery and capability development, the AI Solution Architect provides technical leadership for AI transformation initiatives, ensuring solutions align with customer objectives, enterprise architecture standards, security requirements and responsible AI principles.

The role acts as a trusted advisor to customers, delivery teams, and senior stakeholders, supporting the full lifecycle from opportunity shaping and solution design through to implementation and operational adoption.


Key Responsibilities

Solution Architecture & Design

  • Lead the architecture and design of AI, Data and Automation solutions.
  • Define end-to-end solution architectures spanning data platforms, AI models, integrations, security and operational support.
  • Produce architecture artefacts, technical designs and implementation roadmaps.
  • Ensure solutions are scalable, maintainable and aligned to enterprise standards.
  • Design agentic AI, GenAI, machine learning and automation solutions integrated with business processes and enterprise systems.

Customer Advisory & Consulting

  • Act as a trusted advisor to customer stakeholders, technology leaders and business sponsors.
  • Facilitate discovery workshops to identify opportunities for AI-enabled transformation.
  • Translate business requirements into practical, outcome-focused solution designs.
  • Provide guidance on AI strategy, governance, operating models and adoption approaches.
  • Support customers in defining value cases, investment priorities and transformation roadmaps.

Technical Leadership

  • Provide leadership and direction across multidisciplinary delivery teams.
  • Define technical standards, architecture principles and best practices.
  • Mentor engineers, consultants and emerging architects.
  • Conduct technical assurance reviews and architecture governance activities.
  • Support complex problem solving and technical decision making across programmes.

Pre-Sales & Solution Shaping

  • Support sales teams in developing and qualifying opportunities.
  • Lead solution design activities for proposals, bids and customer presentations.
  • Contribute to estimates, Statements of Work and commercial responses.
  • Help position Sword as a trusted Data & AI transformation partner.
  • Present solution visions and articulate business value to executive stakeholders.
  • Can facilitate executive workshops, challenge customer assumptions, communicate complex concepts simply and build confidence with senior stakeholders.

Governance, Security & Responsible AI

  • Ensure AI solutions adhere to security, compliance and governance requirements.
  • Define controls for responsible AI, model oversight, data privacy and risk management.
  • Review architecture decisions for ethical and regulatory compliance.
  • Establish monitoring, operational readiness and support models.
  • Drive best practice across AI lifecycle management and continuous improvement.

Success Measures

  • Customers view Sword as a trusted strategic transformation partner.
  • AI opportunities progress into high-value engagements and revenue growth.
  • Solutions are delivered securely on time and aligned to business outcomes.
  • Architecture standards are consistently applied across engagements.
  • Reusable patterns, accelerators and reference architectures improve delivery efficiency.
  • Teams are enabled through strong technical leadership and mentoring.
  • AI solutions demonstrate measurable operational, financial or customer value.

Requirements

Essential Experience

  • Proven experience in solution architecture within Data, Analytics, AI or Digital Transformation.
  • Experience delivering enterprise-scale AI, automation or data platform programmes.
  • Strong stakeholder management across business and technology functions.
  • Experience shaping customer opportunities and supporting pre-sales activities.
  • Experience operating within consulting, professional services or transformation environments.

Technical capabilities

A strong AI Solution Architect should also have practical experience with:

  • Foundation Models
  • OpenAI
  • Azure OpenAI
  • Anthropic
  • Google Gemini
  • Model selection and benchmarking
  • Prompt engineering
  • Fine-tuning and model customisation where appropriate

Agentic AI

  • Multi-agent systems
  • Tool calling
  • Function orchestration
  • Workflow automation
  • Planning and reasoning patterns
  • Human-in-the-loop design

Knowledge & Retrieval

  • RAG architectures
  • Vector databases
  • Semantic search
  • Enterprise search
  • Document ingestion
  • Knowledge graphs (advantageous)

Integration

  • APIs
  • Event-driven architectures
  • Microsoft ecosystem
  • ServiceNow
  • CRM/ERP integration
  • Identity management

Software Engineering

  • Python
  • REST APIs
  • Git
  • CI/CD
  • Containers
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • Testing AI systems

Platform Engineering

  • Kubernetes
  • Azure AI Foundry
  • Databricks
  • Microsoft Fabric
  • Snowflake
  • MLOps/LLMOps tooling

Consulting competencies

The AI Solution Architect should be able to:

  • Facilitate AI discovery workshops.
  • Identify and prioritise business use cases.
  • Estimate business value and ROI.
  • Create AI roadmaps.
  • Produce reference architectures.
  • Explain technical trade-offs to executives.
  • Balance innovation with delivery risk.
  • Influence without relying on formal authority.

Personal Attributes

  • Strategic thinker with a strong commercial mindset.
  • Customer-centric and outcome focused.
  • Excellent communication and facilitation skills.
  • Comfortable operating from boardroom discussions to technical design workshops.
  • Curious, innovative and passionate about emerging AI technologies.

Company Benefits

  • competitive salary
  • pension
  • private healthcare
  • employee assistance programme
AI Solution Architect at Sword Group
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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