Team & Role Overview
We are seeking a senior AI engineer / architect to design, deliver and support a range of enterprise AI solutions that automate manual processes, improve information retrieval and create scalable digital capabilities across the business. The role covers new solution design and delivery, support of AI solutions already in production, and establishing rigorous benchmarking and evaluation. An immediate part of the role is taking technical ownership of an existing production multi-agent application (Python, LangChain/LangGraph, Azure).
The role is hands-on and blends Design, Delivery and Support, with technical leadership of internal teams and challenge of external delivery partners where required. It will also establish reusable AI patterns for future initiatives.
Core Responsibilities
Design
- Lead the design of AI-enabled business solutions: architectures, integration patterns and reusable capabilities.
- Benchmark models and AI platforms against real workloads (quality, cost, latency, throughput), including model-swap testing when catalogue versions retire.
- Apply secure-by-design patterns: private endpoints, managed identity, Entra ID RBAC, Key Vault.
- Select LLMs from the approved model catalogue, with mandatory version pinning and lifecycle awareness.
- Produce LLDs, implementation guides and design-authority (TDA) documentation.
Delivery
- Deliver a pipeline of AI-enabled solutions across business functions, from new builds to extensions of live systems.
- Build and deploy Generative AI, RAG, document-intelligence and agent solutions in production, with guardrails and evaluation.
- Implement stateful multi-agent orchestration for multi-step workflows.
- Integrate AI across the enterprise estate: SharePoint, Power Automate, Logic Apps, Event Grid, Microsoft Graph.
- Build golden evaluation datasets with business SMEs and embed evaluation gates in CI/CD.
- Establish deployment, evaluation and monitoring for AI components (LLMOps).
- Guide internal teams and challenge external delivery partners where required.
Support and run
- Support and evolve AI solutions in production: code comprehension, refactoring, technical debt reduction and framework / dependency upgrades.
- Take technical ownership of the existing multi-agent data extraction application and chatbot (Python, LangChain/LangGraph, React).
- Tune and re-baseline AI components as models, prompts and retrieval configuration change.
- Provide production support: incident triage, root-cause analysis of non-deterministic failures, and runbooks.
Qualifications & Experience
AI and Machine Learning
- Generative AI and LLMs, including prompt and context engineering
- RAG retrieval-quality engineering: chunking, embedding selection, hybrid / semantic search and reranking on complex, document-heavy sources
- Agents and orchestration: stateful multi-step workflows, structured (JSON-schema) outputs, tool calling, grounding checks, confidence thresholds, human review, source traceability
- Intelligent document processing and information extraction, including extraction model selection
- Guardrails and agentic safety: content safety (e.g. Azure AI Content Safety), prompt-injection and data-exfiltration defence
- Evaluation and benchmarking: field-level extraction metrics (precision, recall, F1), multi-turn chatbot evaluation, calibration against human labels, handling non-determinism, prompt-injection test suites
Microsoft Azure
- Azure AI Foundry / Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Azure AI Document Intelligence
- App Services, Functions and API Management
- Entra ID / managed identity, RBAC, Key Vault, private networking
Engineering and Integration
- Python: strong, demonstrable experience, including architecture, packaging, dependency management, validation, async and testing
- Agentic frameworks: LangGraph or LangChain (used in the existing platform), with the ability to work in others
- API-first architectures and integration with M365, SharePoint and Microsoft Graph
- Infrastructure-as-Code (Bicep)
- LLMOps: agent-step tracing, token / cost / latency monitoring, groundedness / hallucination scoring, prompt and agent regression testing
- CI/CD in Azure DevOps, including AI evaluation gates and environment promotion
Governance and Delivery
- Approved model catalogue, version pinning and lifecycle management
- Design documentation (LLDs, TDA) that stands up to architecture review
- Track record of inheriting and stabilising systems built by others, including formal handover
Desirable
- Ability to stand up a functional web UI or prototype over the APIs (React / TypeScript): competence, not front-end specialism.
- Experience improving extraction accuracy on complex, document-heavy RAG sources.
- Vector databases beyond Azure AI Search.
- Relevant certifications (Azure AI Engineer Associate, Azure Solutions Architect Expert).
Critical behaviours
These embody our culture and are central to how we work together at SMBC Aviation Capital:
- Respect: Two-way communication: listen intently, give quieter voices a platform and be conscious of tone. Respect people’s time and be flexible in accommodating others.
- Trust: Create a psychologically safe space. Do what you say you will do, when you say you will do it. Be honest, communicate openly and be respectful of each other’s needs.
- Integrity: Always do what is right including when no one is watching; treat people with respect and kindness; be self-aware, compassionate and embrace diversity.
- Connect: Collaborate to unleash the full potential of our diverse talent. Respect each other’s expertise and perspective and welcome challenge. Foster an inclusive and fun environment where accomplishments are recognised and take pride in winning together.
- Adapt: Be brave and curious – anticipate the future and be proactive. Have a ‘why not’ attitude, learn from previous experiences. Call out bureaucracy when it is evident in a process or way of working. Be agile to meet and exceed our customers’ needs. Demonstrate resilience and support each other.
- Achieve: Take accountability and ownership to deliver results, be ambitious and take pride in everything we do. Set each other up for success and share insights. Do what it takes to drive positive change and seek opportunities to innovate and grow our business and people.
Take your career to new heights – come join us at SMBC Aviation Capital
We are a fast paced, growing business with a focus on excellence where a world of opportunity awaits candidates with the right attitude and ambition.
Through the SMBC Aviation Capital People Commitment we offer a comprehensive suite of benefits, aligned to your needs as you move through different career and life stages. The SMBC AC People Commitment also includes our people-led culture; reward & recognition; along with our learning, wellbeing, inclusion, engagement, and CSR initiatives. In return, we ask you to bring your ambition and commitment to your work here at SMBC AC to mutually create an exceptional employee experience.
Our workplace is one where diversity is welcome, and people of all backgrounds are supported to be at their best. We are an equal opportunities employer and strive to build an ever-inclusive work environment. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees. Should you have a reasonable accommodation request please reach out to us at [email protected]