Head of Artificial Intelligence

Head of AI \& Architecture | Deputy CTO London | Contract | Up to £900 p/d Client is giving preference to candidates from a Management Consulting background or within Financial Services or Insurance. A first-wave AI programme inside a regulated financial services business. Around twenty-two people are being appointed at once across architecture, engineering, analysis, data science, product and risk. You will need to set architecture for a legacy banking estate that predates AI conversations by decades, and a control function that has to accept the design before anything ships Deputizing for the the CTO as the AI Lead Consultant you will question and answer "are we using the right technology?" Agent and RAG architecture, MCP and tool integration, retrieval over a knowledge graph, LLMOps for deployment, monitoring and maintenance. Integration into mainframe, batch and event interfaces. AI operating model and governance framework aligned to PRA SS1/23 and the EU AI Act. Responsible AI guardrails and GenAI validation. Bringing a newly formed, multidisciplinary AI team architecture, engineering, product, data science and risk into one coherent capability, rather than a set of individually strong but locally optimised decisions. Holding the line on contested technology calls with senior stakeholders, and carrying the decision when the room does not agree. PROFILES NEED * RAG, MCP and prompt agents built for financial services clients * Deep enterprise data and integration architecture into the estate. * AI operating model and governance framework delivered against PRA SS1/23 and the EU AI Act * LLMOps and GenAI validation -- released, monitored and kept honest * Knowledge graph and retrieval architecture * AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Azure multi-cloud, no single-vendor allegiance * Consultancy-side delivery into a regulated client, including interim Head of AI positions * Computer science background and genuine architecture seniority