Head of AI & Automation Engineering

Job Type:  Permanent  

Location: Hybrid: based at any of our UK offices Birmingham, London, Telford, Edinburgh with time spent working in the office and at home

Flexible working: All roles are open to part-time, job-share and other types of flexibility. We will discuss what is important to you and balancing this with business requirements during the recruitment process. You can read more about flexible working here.

Closing Date: 15th October

Salary and benefits: from £120,000 (dependant upon experience) plus an indicative bonus range of 30–60%, private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more.

Who are we?  

 
We’re Standard Life, a retirement specialist focused entirely on retirement savings and income. We champion the belief that everyone’s journey to and through retirement can be better, and for more than 200 years, we’ve been helping our customers plan and prepare for their financial futures. 

Life today is increasingly complicated, uncertain and unpredictable. People move through different careers, face unexpected moments and navigate important choices. We offer our colleagues flexibility, trust and benefits that work for whatever life brings. In return we expect curiosity, connection, accountability and high standards. We make room for what matters - so you can bring your best, every day. 

The role  

This is a senior leadership role at the centre of our Pensions & Savings AI and automation ambition. You will build and lead an engineering practice that takes opportunities from idea through to production, creating reusable patterns, strong engineering standards and safe routes to scale. You will work with business, technology, data, risk and change leaders to ensure AI and automation solve the right problems and deliver sustainable value.  You will have the opportunity to shape the engineering practice from an early stage and to develop the people in it, including the skills and career pathways that let engineers grow as the practice grow. The balance of the role: This is not a purely strategic post. The successful candidate will be comfortable moving between executive-level direction, practice leadership and hands-on technical challenge when it matters.
 

What you will do

• Lead the Pensions & Savings AI and Automation Engineering practice, setting its technical direction, delivery standards, operating model and talent strategy
• Define and implement a Forward Deployed Engineer model, embedding engineers in Pensions & Savings Journey and Product teams, where they work alongside product and business colleagues to understand problems and build solutions together.
• Collaborate with AI teams across the Enterprise, participating in Enterprise AI initiatives and transformation ensuring appropriate engagement with AI CoE Governance and Framework
• Turn Pensions & savings AI and automation priorities into an executable engineering roadmap, balancing rapid experimentation with resilient production delivery
• Provide hands-on technical leadership across solution design, engineering quality and complex delivery decisions, while creating space for engineers to own outcomes
• Build reusable platforms, patterns and components for AI agents, intelligent automation and low-code or pro-code solutions, reducing duplication and accelerating delivery
• Create strong engineering lifecycle controls covering security, data protection, testing, observability, model and prompt evaluation, human oversight, release and support
• Partner with business units and product teams to shape use cases, redesign processes and establish measurable value, adoption and service outcomes
• Work closely with the AI Centre of Excellence, Architecture, information security, Risk so that responsible AI and regulatory expectations are embedded by design
• Develop a high-performing, inclusive team and wider engineering community through coaching, standards, career pathways and strategic partners
• Own engineering performance, capacity, supplier contribution and financial discipline, using evidence to prioritise investment and continuously improve

What are we looking for?

• Proven leadership of AI, automation, software or platform engineering teams, with accountability for delivering secure, reliable services into production
• Strong technical depth in modern AI and automation engineering, including generative AI or agentic solutions, cloud platforms, APIs, integration and software engineering practices.  
• Technical depth across AWS (Bedrock, AgentCore) and Azure (Copilot Studio, Foundry), also across agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, Pydantic AI, etc. sufficient to guide tool selection and challenge designs for workflow orchestration, tool integration and human oversight
• A strong working understanding of evaluation and monitoring tools such as Langfuse, LangSmith, DeepEval or Promptfoo, and of how to trace agent behaviour, evaluate outputs and monitor production performance at scale
• Experience setting direction on AI gateways for secure model access, routing and rate limits
• Practical knowledge of MLOps and LLMOps, including model and prompt management, evaluation, guardrails, monitoring, explainability, cost optimisation and continuous improvement
• Experience establishing engineering standards and lifecycle controls for security, testing, evaluation, observability, resilience and operational support
• A track record of translating business strategy into prioritised roadmaps and measurable outcomes, working effectively across product, technology, data, risk and operational teams
• Inclusive people leadership and the ability to attract, coach and develop senior engineers while influencing executives, partners and multidisciplinary stakeholders

How will we measure success?

• A clear, prioritised engineering roadmap aligned to business outcomes and responsible AI guardrails
• AI and automation solutions moving safely from experimentation into supported production services
• Reusable engineering patterns and improved delivery flow
• Measurable value, adoption, reliability and risk outcomes for the services delivered
• A strong hybrid engineering capability with clear standards, skills and career pathways

We want to hire the whole version of you.

We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we’ve advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we’d love to hear from you.  

If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best.  

We’re reviewing applications as they come in, so apply early to avoid missing out.

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Find out more about working at Standard Life

Guide for Candidates: standardlifeplc.pagetiger.com/guideforcandidates 

Find or get answers from our colleagues: www.standardlifeplc.com/careers/talk-to-us