Applied AI Engineer - BPL

Join us as an Applied AI Engineer, to support the development and adoption of scalable AI and machine learning solutions across Barclays, contributing to innovation within our technology and business landscape.

This role sits within our AI and engineering ecosystem, where you will design and build practical AI solutions aligned with business needs, while supporting consistent and responsible adoption across teams. You will contribute to delivering enterprise AI solutions, ensuring they are reliable, secure and aligned with engineering and governance expectations.

This is an opportunity to work with modern AI approaches, including GenAI, while collaborating with a broad range of stakeholders and supporting sustainable innovation at scale.

To be successful as an Applied AI Engineer, you should have experience with:

• Experience using Python and machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow or scikit-learn to build and deploy scalable solutions.
• Experience developing advanced AI/ML and GenAI solutions, including working with LLMs, RAG, MCP, agents or similar patterns in practical environments.
• Experience working with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP to design and support scalable AI systems.

Some other highly valued skills may include

• Experience with AI operations practices, including CI/CD, evaluation frameworks, monitoring and model registries.
• Experience with data engineering and large-scale data processing.
• Payments or fintech experience, or experience working in dynamic change or transformation environments, alongside stakeholder communication and collaboration skills.

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, 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.