Staff Engineer-Applied AI

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.

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.

Join us as a Staff Engineer-Applied AI. At Barclays, we don’t just adapt to the future, we create it. As a Staff Engineer-Applied AI you will support the organisation, achieve its strategic objectives by the identification of business requirements and solutions that address business problems and opportunities.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the development of GenAI & Agentic AI systems & solutions to build intelligent conversational AI and workflow automation for specific business domains.
• Design and develop Full-Stack Multi Agentic AI systems using Agentic AI frameworks, LLMs and technologies, build function tools and integrate them with Back-End systems using REST-API, MCP or A2A protocols.
• Design, develop and Expose Agentic AI back-end, wrap existing back-end systems with MCP Servers to other agentic front-end and agentic back-end systems.
• Apply context engineering techniques such as context caching, context compression etc... to improve model’s (LLM) performance and response times.
• Implement guardrails & policy enforcement for safety and security risks that are required to duly comply with the organization’s data privacy and security standards.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify requirements and develop solutions to meet business needs within the organization.
• Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including senior leadership.
• Develop and maintain tools and frameworks for prompt-based model training, evaluation, and optimization.
• Analyze and interpret data to evaluate model performance and identify areas of improvement.

To be a successful Staff Engineer-Applied AI, you should have experience with:

• A Bachelor’s degree (or above) in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or a related discipline.
• Experience in developing software applications for scale on cloud(AWS or Azure or GCP). Fluent in Python or Java or GoLang programming language and frameworks.
• Hands-on experience in GenAI and Agentic AI frameworks such as LangGraph/LangChain, CrewAI, Strands SDK, Google ADK etc.. Familiarity on working with MCP and A2A protocols.
• Solid understanding of working with LLM Models, writing prompts efficiently that provides accurate context for LLM Agents.
• Hands-on experience in developing and deploying Agentic AI solutions using cloud native services like AWS Bedrock or Azure AI Foundry or GCP Vertex AI.
• Strong understanding of AI implementation in software development and legacy code transformation.
• Experience in developing APIs and integrating LLM models into software applications.
• Ability to work on system design from ideation through completion with limited supervision. Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to communicate ideas and results to stakeholders and leadership in a clear and concise manner.

Additional relevant skills given below are highly valued

• Familiarity with model fine-tuning techniques such as supervised or Reinforced Learning.
• Knowledge of banking, financial products and services.

This role is based in Bangalore.