Lead Platform Engineer

Key Requirements

• Hands-On Technical Leadership: Deliver core platform components (Python services, orchestration, GPU clusters, inference gateways, model registries).
• Technical Strategy & Direction: Define and evolve the technical roadmap for AI enablement—covering generative AI, LLMOps, model serving, and data pipelines.
• Platform at Scale: Apply experience running large-scale distributed platforms with high reliability, cost efficiency, and security.
• Gen AI Expertise: Understand unique challenges in Generative AI (e.g., latency, cost, safety, evaluation, fine-tuning) and design solutions accordingly.
• Plugged into AI Developments: Stay current with emerging AI trends, foundation models, open-source tooling, and best practices; bring insights into platform evolution.
• Governance & Risk Management:
  • Embed secure-by-design principles, compliance controls, and auditability into platform architecture.
  • Ensure adherence to data privacy, model governance, and AI safety standards.
  • Partner with Risk, Compliance, and Cyber teams to mitigate operational and regulatory risks.
• Build High-Quality Systems: Write clean, maintainable code; enforce best practices in CI/CD, testing, observability, and secure coding.
• Mentorship & Talent Development: Coach engineers on advanced AI infrastructure patterns, performance tuning, and cloud-native design.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with front-office developers, internal platforms, and infra teams to align technical solutions with business needs.
• Operational Excellence: Drive reliability (SLOs), cost optimization, and incident response for AI platform services.

Key Skills

• Expert-level Python for backend and infrastructure tooling.
• Deep AWS expertise (IAM, KMS, EKS, ECS, Lambda, Glue, Step Functions, MSK, Bedrock).
• Proven experience running platforms at scale (high availability, cost optimization, observability).
• Strong grasp of Generative AI challenges: inference optimization, model lifecycle, evaluation, safety guardrails.
• Ability to lead by doing—hands-on coding, debugging, and performance tuning.
• Awareness of AI/ML infrastructure trends and ability to integrate emerging technologies.
• Strong sense of Governance and Risk Management for AI workloads.

Preferred Tech & Tools

• LLMOps / AI Infra: LiteLLM, Mem0, MLflow, Langfuse for evaluation and tracing.
• Data & Compute: Databricks, SageMaker for model training and deployment.
• Observability & Monitoring: Observe, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus for platform telemetry.
• Vector & Retrieval: FAISS, Weaviate, or equivalent for RAG pipelines.
• GPU Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS/on-prem), Ray, Slurm for distributed training/inference

Desirable Tech & Tools

• Azure exposure and hybrid cloud strategies.
• On-prem Kubernetes and GPU cluster experience.
• Familiarity with quant workflows and financial data patterns.
• Experience with fine-tuning and custom model deployment.

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. 

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.

Director Expectations

• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
• Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.
• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.
• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.
• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

All Senior 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.

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.