Purpose of the role
To design, develop and improve software, utilising various engineering methodologies, that provides business, platform, and technology capabilities for our customers and colleagues.
Role Overview
Join Barclays as a Senior AI Platform Engineer, where you will lead the design, delivery, and operational excellence of our enterprise AI infrastructure. You will own the engineering quality and technical direction across core platform subsystems including the AI Gateway, inference routing, guardrails, and observability - ensuring they are secure, scalable, and production-grade. This role combines technical leadership with hands-on delivery. You will drive execution across workstreams, set engineering standards, remove blockers for the team, and coach engineers to grow their skills and autonomy.
Accountabilities
- Development and delivery of high-quality software solutions by using industry aligned programming languages, frameworks, and tools. Ensuring that code is scalable, maintainable, and optimized for performance.
- Cross-functional collaboration with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define software requirements, devise solution strategies, and ensure seamless integration and alignment with business objectives.
- Collaboration with peers, participate in code reviews, and promote a culture of code quality and knowledge sharing.
- Stay informed of industry technology trends and innovations and actively contribute to the organization’s technology communities to foster a culture of technical excellence and growth.
- Adherence to secure coding practices to mitigate vulnerabilities, protect sensitive data, and ensure secure software solutions.
- Implementation of effective unit testing practices to ensure proper code design, readability, and reliability.
Vice President Expectations
- To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures.
- As an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions.
- Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
- Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
- Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
- Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
- Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
- Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
- Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.
All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.
Essential Skills
- Platform/infra architecture at enterprise scale — distributed systems, active-active, failover patterns
- Expert Python (FastAPI/async) or Go/Java — high-throughput, low-latency production systems
- Deep AWS/EKS/Envoy — Bedrock, IAM, Aurora, CloudFormation, GPU scheduling, multi-tenancy, service mesh (Istio), envoy
- GenAI/Agentic AI — LangGraph/LangChain or Google ADK, MCP/A2A protocols, prompt engineering, RAG, vLLM serving
Highly Valued Skills
- AI safety/guardrails — prompt injection detection, PII redaction, content filtering
- AI security frameworks — NIST AI RMF, MITRE ATLAS, OWASP LLM Top 10
- Envoy Proxy (xDS API, WASM filters, AI Gateway extensions)
- Financial services background — regulatory, data residency, compliance
