Senior AI Engineer

• *About Allica Bank**

Allica is the UK’s fastest growing company \- and the fastest\-growing financial technology (Fintech) firm ever. Our purpose is to help established SMEs, one of the last major underserved opportunities in Fintech.

Established SMEs are the backbone of local communities \- representing over a third of our economy \- yet have been largely neglected both by traditional high street banks and modern fintech providers.

• *The Opportunity**

Allica is the UK's fastest\-growing fintech, built for a group everyone else overlooked: established SMEs — the businesses that make up a third of the economy yet have been underserved by high\-street banks and consumer fintechs alike.

Reporting directly to our CTO, you'll own the AI systems that turn our Voice of Customer data — the thousands of calls, conversations, and emails our customers have with us every day — into insight the whole bank can search, understand, and act on.

It's a senior, hands\-on role with real autonomy. You'll take problems from a rough idea through to systems running reliably and safely in production inside a regulated bank. You won't be working through someone else's backlog; you'll help decide what's worth building and then build it.

• *What we’re looking for:**

We care far more about what you can do than how long you've done it. If most of the below describes you, we'd like to talk — you don't need every line.

• *Core Experience**

• Strong software engineering background, with deep proficiency in Python.
• Experience building and shipping LLM\-powered tools or agents into production — using OpenAI, Anthropic's Claude, or open\-source models — not just prototypes.
• Hands\-on experience and understanding of embeddings, vector databases, RAG and semantic search over large volumes of unstructured text.

• *Engineering \& Delivery**

• Comfortable deploying, versioning, and monitoring models in production.
• Experience with large\-scale data platforms or cloud warehouses (BigQuery or similar) to build and run AI pipelines.
• Full\-stack enough to wire your work into a usable API or interface end to end.

• *Quality, safety \& judgement**

• You evaluate models rigorously — building pipelines to measure quality, accuracy, and fairness, and weighing vendor against open\-source options.
• You take privacy, bias, and safety seriously, particularly where AI touches real customers in a regulated setting.

• *Nice to have**

• Experience with conversational, call or transcript data
• Exposure to financial services or another regulated environment

• *How we'll work together**

You'll join a small, senior team with a direct line to the CTO and a clear mandate. We value people who are curious, take ownership, and can translate technical ideas into something the business understands and trusts. We move quickly, but we hold a high bar for quality and responsible deployment — because we're a bank, and our customers rely on us.

• *Working at Allica Bank**

At Allica Bank we want to ensure our employees have the right tools and environment in which to succeed in their role and in support of our customers.

Our employees are at the heart of everything we do, so our benefits are designed with you in mind:

• Full onboarding support and continued development opportunities
• Options for flexible working
• Regular social activities
• Pension contributions
• Discretionary bonus scheme
• Private health cover
• Life assurance
• Family friendly policies including enhanced Maternity \& Paternity leave

• *Don’t tick every box?**

Don’t worry if you don’t have all the skills or requirements listed on the job description. If you think you’ll be a good fit, we’d still love to hear from you!

• *Flexible working**

We know the ‘9\-to\-5’ isn’t right for everyone. That’s why Allica Bank is fully committed to flexible and hybrid working. Please let us know what is best for you and, if we can, we will do our best to accommodate.

• *Diversity**

We’re a diverse bunch here at Allica, with all kinds of experiences, backgrounds and lifestyles. Our openness and differences make us stronger, and we want everybody to feel comfortable bringing as much of themselves to work with them as they like.