AI Governance Engineer - BPL

Join us as an AI Governance Lead, to support and evolve responsible AI adoption across Barclays by embedding clear and effective governance, risk and oversight frameworks within our technology and innovation landscape.
 

This role sits within our AI and engineering ecosystem, where you will help translate policy, regulatory and risk requirements into practical and scalable technical approaches, while enabling teams to innovate in a safe and supportive way. You will contribute to shaping enterprise-wide AI governance, ensuring solutions are secure, auditable and aligned with business and regulatory expectations. This is an opportunity to contribute to how AI is developed and deployed at scale, working with a wide range of stakeholders and advanced technologies, while helping Barclays maintain trust and enable innovation in a balanced and sustainable way.
 

To be successful as an AI Governance Lead, you should have experience with:
 

• Solid Python and software engineering background, with a focus on building scalable, production-grade systems.
• Experience implementing policy-as-code, governance-as-code or rules-as-code frameworks, including designing and embedding these approaches across large-scale environments and supporting their adoption across multiple teams.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment pipelines and integration within modern engineering environments, including contributing to engineering standards and supporting consistent practices across programmes or functions.
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Some other highly valued skills may include:
 

• Cloud architecture experience, ideally AWS and/or Azure.
• Knowledge of MLOps, LLMOps, model registries, evaluation frameworks and observability.
• In-depth understanding of AI governance, model risk, technology risk, data privacy, security and auditability.
   

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and oversight, change and transformation, business acumen, strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.
 

This role will be based in London.
 

The successful candidate will be based in London. Our offices are located at 1 Churchill Place and 7 Westferry Circus (new BPL office). We support a hybrid working pattern with 3 days per week office-based presence expected. 

Barclays’ payments acceptance business provides critical infrastructure to the UK economy, processing billions of pounds of payments annually for both small businesses and domestic and international corporate clients.

In April 2025, we announced a long-term partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to grow and transform the payments acceptance business by broadening the range of services offered, enhancing the experience for both existing and prospective clients. Leveraging extensive client relationships and deep experience of UK payments, we will create an environment of continuous innovation - activated by Brookfield’s global private equity expertise in payments, technology, operational transformation and corporate carve-outs - to ensure the business is strategically positioned for long-term growth.

Barclays will invest approximately £400m in the new business, the majority of which will be incurred during the first three years. Performance-linked incentives will drive greater alignment between the partners, underpinning the long-term commitment to the transformation. Barclays and Brookfield will work to create a standalone entity over time, continuing to use the Barclaycard Payments (BPL) brand and acting as the sole payments’ acceptance services provider to Barclays’ clients for a minimum of ten years. 

For more information on our partnership with Brookfield, please visit Barclays.com.

Purpose of the role

To build and maintain the systems that collect, store, process, and analyse data, such as data pipelines, data warehouses and data lakes to ensure that all data is accurate, accessible, and secure. 

Accountabilities

• Build and maintenance of data architectures pipelines that enable the transfer and processing of durable, complete and consistent data.
• Design and implementation of data warehoused and data lakes that manage the appropriate data volumes and velocity and adhere to the required security measures.
• Development of processing and analysis algorithms fit for the intended data complexity and volumes.
• Collaboration with data scientist to build and deploy machine learning models.

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..
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others..
• OR for 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.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• 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.