Join us as an AI Principal Engineer

• This is an opportunity for a driven senior engineer to take on an exciting new career challenge while building a wide network of stakeholders of varying levels of seniority
• We’ll look to you to combine core software engineer skills with specialised AI knowledge to build intelligent systems that can solve complex problems and drive innovation within NatWest
• You’ll play a pivotal role in the Wealth AI Centre of Excellence team in architecting, building and maintaining a highly extensible, scalable and maintainable platform that offers effective, reliable, and ethical AI solutions

What you'll do
 

As an AI Principal Engineer, you’ll be helping to define and drive the architectural vision for your team to build the foundational infrastructure, tools and services that enable scalable, reliable and efficient development and deployment of assistant and agentic AI solutions across the Wealth franchise and functions.

You’ll also be:

• Designing, building and maintaining scalable and robust AI infrastructure and platform services
• Responsible for the end-to-end delivery of services and features, making sure they’re high quality and on time
• Building tools and pipelines for prompt and context engineering, fine-tuning, evaluation, and monitoring of large language models (LLMs)
• Collaborating with machine learning researchers, data scientists, and business journey product teams to understand use cases and deliver reusable platform capabilities
• Contributing to the development of platform UI components, libraries, and documentation to accelerate LLM adoption
• Working across the life cycle, from requirements analysis and design, through coding to testing, deployment and operations
• Mentoring AI software engineers and fostering a culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, and inclusive collaboration

The skills you'll need

To take on this role, you’ll need a background in software engineering, software design, architecture, machine learning or a related field, including technical skills in software engineering, testing, deployment, and an understanding of how your area of expertise supports our customers.

Additionally, you’ll bring working experience with LLMs and generative AI APIs such as OpenAI GPT and Claude, paired with knowledge of prompt and context engineering techniques. Ideally, you’ll also have experience with fine-tuning or customising LLMs, but this isn’t essential.

You’ll also need:

• Strong programming skills in Python or Java, as well as proven knowledge of web technologies and web security
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure and GCP, and container orchestration like Kubernetes
• Experience of working with vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation architectures
• Experience of building RESTful APIs for internal and external consumption
• Experience with building and maintaining data pipelines with messaging systems such as Kafka, Active MQ or similar
• DevOps knowledge including Docker, GitLab, ArgoCD, or similar tools for automation and deployment pipelines
• The demonstrated ability to lead engineering teams and influence strategic decisions

Hours

41

Job Posting Closing Date:

13/10/2025