Applied AI Lead, UK

The Role Applied AI owns the journey from signed contract to embedded, measurable production value inside the bank. In regulated environments that is as much a trust and change problem as an engineering one. We are looking for an Applied AI Lead who blends banking domain credibility, hands-on agentic build skill, and the influencing and coaching ability to drive adoption. This role builds and proves the AI rather than just promote it. You will work directly with the bank and own the work, the people, the trust and the value. Where a Forward Deployed Engineer is on the account you operate as a two-person pod and the customer sees one team. You report into the Head of Applied AI and work alongside Commercial, Product and Engineering. What You'll Do The role runs five concurrent workstreams: * Translation. Turn how the bank works into how agents work and coordinate tasks in an agentic workflow. Sit with credit officers, relationship managers, loan operations and compliance, observe the work, then decompose it into workflow specification. That includes the undocumented rules, edge cases and policy thresholds no policy document ever captured. * Build and configure. Configure and iterate agentic workflows on the Covecta platform: prompts, judges, output templates and decision boundaries. Tune the workflow runtime against banker feedback, partnering with engineering on the customer-specific integration the design depends on. * Prove it (evals). Make trust measurable rather than asserted. Define acceptance criteria with the bankers who use the output. Build and curate eval packs and a golden set that grows with the engagement. Run the evals, triage quality issues and harden the system before it reaches the wider user base. This is what lets a regulated bank put its name behind an AI decision. * Adoption and behavioral change. Drive the human side of AI adoption. Coach users from doing the work to reviewing the AI. Identify and certify internal Super Users and equip them with peer-to-peer material so they shift their own teams. Grow consumption and make it stick. * Governance, value and expansion. Own the senior relationship and the narrative. Run the SteerCo and executive sponsor cadence. Produce quarterly value reports and partner with the account director on renewals and expansion, handing them the evidence that moves the executive relationship forward. Validate roadmap priorities against real banking needs, and feed the field back into the product. What We're Looking For * Banking domain credibility - You have operated inside commercial lending or credit, or served those teams closely enough to know how the work actually runs. * You build and prove, not just advise - You get satisfaction from configuring a workflow, watching it get an answer right, and then proving it is right against real evidence before anyone relies on it. You are comfortable defining what "good" looks like, building the tests, and holding the bar. You would rather show the work than describe it. * Real fluency with AI tools - You are already highly proficient across a suite of them and you follow what is shipping week to week. You have several examples of deploying AI effectively in a professional setting, for your own work or for the team around you. * The influence to change behavior - Coaching, encouraging and guiding people through the most significant technology shift of their careers, not telling them it is coming. * Customer obsession - You take real enjoyment in understanding a customer's pain point and what it will take to make them successful, and you build trust by going beyond what was asked. * Pace - We are moving fast and we need to move faster. Bonus Points For * Hands-on work with agentic AI: multi-step workflows, orchestration, evals, rather than single-prompt tools. * QA, acceptance testing or model quality assurance in a regulated environment. * Change or super-user programs inside a large financial institution. * Exposure to core lending, origination or credit platforms. Why Join Covecta Our mission is to deliver the intelligence of a seasoned banker across all financial work. The industry has spent two decades buying software as a service: another tool the bank operates, where the real work still happens outside it. We are building software as a banker. An agentic operating system that does the job of a financial institution's best people and brings completed work to a human for review. That shift is the whole point of this role. You are the person who gets a bank to trust the work enough to review it rather than redo it. Covecta is a specialist AI workforce for lending, deposits and AML/KYC, deployed where the bank's teams already work. Each agentic workflow encodes a specific banking use case, and the intelligence learns and compounds as it runs. We are expanding in the US and building the team to match. Benefits * Competitive salary depending on experience * Competitive bonus * Meaningful equity * Medical insurance * Brand new MacBook * Company-wide annual offsite