Technical Director - Financial Services

Job Description

About Faculty

Faculty transforms organisational performance through safe, impactful and human-led AI.

We are Europe’s leading applied AI company, and saw its potential a decade ago - long before the current hype cycle.

We were founded in 2014 with our Fellowship programme, training academics to become commercial data scientists.

Today, we provide over 300 global customers with industry-leading software, and bespoke AI consultancy for retail, healthcare, energy, and governmental organisations, as well as our award winning Fellowship.

Our expertise and safety credentials are such that OpenAI asked us to be their first technical partner, helping customers deploy cutting-edge generative AI safely.

Our high-impact work has saved lives through forecasting NHS demand during covid, produced green energy by routing boats towards the wind, slashed marketing spend by predicting customer spending habits, and kept children safe online.

AI is an epoch-defining technology. We want people to join us who can help our customers reap its enormous benefits safely.

About the role

Our Technical Directors play a vital role in shaping the overall technical strategy for their business unit alongside assembling and managing the highly skilled team to deliver innovative solutions for our customers.

This is a newly created position which reflects rapid growth and demand on our Financial Services side of the business. We will look to this individual to lead development and delivery of high-calibre, applied AI solutions, across our Financial Services clients. This individual will also temporarily lead our technical engagements with Consumer Services customers as part of maternity cover in that area.

What you’ll be doing

As part of your day-to-day job, you can expect your key responsibilities to include:


Technical Delivery

• Provide oversight of highly complex technical work, supporting and steering delivery teams when needed

• Identify products, tools and processes to improve/enhance our ability to deliver quality

• Advise on matters of solution architecture, advanced modelling and engineering by bringing your own extensive technical background of developing both infrastructure and modelling software in resource-constrained settings

Leadership

• Lead on recruiting and developing technical staff of the world-class calibre for which Faculty is renowned

• Collaborate with the BU Director on team structure, commercial strategy, and project resourcing

• Lead a team focused on best-in-class technical excellence and delivery by setting standards, defining ways of working and championing best practice

• Own the professional development of team members

• Produce and share technical thought leadership across Faculty. Encourage others to do the likewise.

Business Development

• Identify new technical markets to pursue/ technologies to build and equally, potential customer and partners opportunities within those markets

• Work with Business Directors, and the commercial team to land, and expand, market opportunities

• Deliver as the technical authority in meetings with senior client stakeholders

Who we’re looking for

To be successful in this role, you’ll need the ability to balance commercial, technical and strategic needs across multiple large-scale projects at a time, specifically in the Financial Services space.

You'll need to be highly motivated to work within this environment with a real enthusiasm for delivering solutions to some of the world's most interesting problems through the delivery of safe, impactful and human-led AI.


In particular, you’ll:

• Be an established technology leader with a track record of leading both the strategy and the delivery of projects in the AI / Machine Learning space

• Have strong understanding of MLOps, with experience deploying AI applications in Financial Services which have generated commercial value

• Have experience leading full-stack technology teams, with a good grasp of systems architecture, design and good engineering fundamentals

• Have an interest, and demonstrable experience, in helping individuals continue their technical and professional development

• Have knowledge of the financial services landscape, with a grasp of commercial drivers and an ability to articulate how AI can accelerate these

• Have the ability to communicate complex, technical information to internal and external stakeholders

• Show strong commercial aptitude, with the ability to balance effective delivery with profit margin

• Have worked with, or in, full-stack technology teams and understand system architecture, design and good engineering fundamentals.

At Faculty, your attitude and behaviour are just as important as your skills and experience. Our principles guide our day-to-day actions and we look for individuals who can demonstrate their alignment with these.

We like people who combine expertise and ambition with optimism -- who are interested in changing the world for the better -- and have the drive and focus to make it happen. If you’re a good fit for Faculty, you probably:

• Love finding new ways to solve old problems - when it comes to your work and professional development, you don’t believe in ‘good enough’. You always seek new ways to solve old challenges.

• Think scientifically, even if you’re not a scientist - you test assumptions, seek evidence and are always looking for opportunities to improve the way we do things.

• Are pragmatic and outcome-focused - you know how to balance the big picture with the little details and know a great idea is useless if it can’t be executed in the real world.

We believe diversity of individuals working together fosters diversity of thought, and this is the bedrock of true innovation. We recognise the potential for AI to be authored by, and serve, the most dominant voices of our time; part of our commitment to countering this is to ensure we hire, and support, a diverse workforce to lead the ground-breaking work we do in Applied AI. We encourage applications from all underrepresented groups in this field.

What we can offer you:

The Faculty team is diverse and distinctive, and we all come from different personal, professional and organisational backgrounds. We all have one thing in common: we are driven by a deep intellectual curiosity that powers us forward each day.

Faculty is the professional challenge of a lifetime. You’ll be surrounded by an impressive group of brilliant minds working to achieve our collective goals. Our consultants, product developers, business development specialists, operations professionals and more all bring something unique to Faculty, and you’ll learn something new from everyone you meet. You’ll also have the opportunity to make your mark on a high-growth start-up now poised to expand internationally.