AI Engineering Lead, GenAI Platform

Role details

About 9fin 9fin is the AI platform powering global debt markets — the world’s largest asset class at over $145 trillion. Debt markets are vast, global, and mission-critical, yet still run on fragmented data, PDFs, and manual workflows. 9fin replaces this broken infrastructure with a single platform that centralises proprietary credit data, deep analysis, and high-value workflows across global markets. Today, 9fin powers teams at 300+ blue-chip institutions worldwide, including global banks, asset managers, private equity firms, law firms, and advisors. The business is scaling at exceptional speed, with rapid expansion in the US and best-in-class retention driven by deep workflow adoption. We’re at a defining inflection point. With proven product-market fit and strong, global market pull, 9fin is accelerating toward becoming the category-defining platform for debt markets worldwide. THE OPPORTUNITY The AI Engineering team at 9fin is building the next generation of AI capabilities that will power our products for years to come. We're looking for an Engineering Lead to lead the GenAI Platform team, building the shared foundations that enable product teams to develop and operate AI-powered products and agents. Reporting to the Head of AI, you'll own the team's development, technical direction and delivery. You'll shape the platform strategy and roadmap, working with product and engineering teams to understand their needs and decide where shared capabilities will have the greatest impact. You'll combine people leadership with strong engineering judgement, staying close to architecture and code while giving engineers the support and autonomy to do their best work. Every day is different, but here's an example of the kind of things you'll work on: - Lead and grow the team through hiring, coaching, feedback and clear expectations for performance and development. - Set the GenAI platform's direction and priorities, evaluate technical approaches and adapt the roadmap as product needs and evidence evolve. - Own the delivery and operation of reliable, secure and scalable platform capabilities, balancing quality, performance, cost and speed of development. - Make the GenAI platform easy for other engineers to adopt and extend through effective APIs, tooling, documentation and clear ownership. - Partner with AI and evaluation specialists to establish how platform changes are tested, measured and released. - Work with product, engineering and security colleagues to resolve dependencies, communicate trade-offs and turn emerging needs into sustainable capabilities. WHAT MAKES THIS ROLE DIFFERENT You'll join an evolving GenAI platform with substantial scope to shape its next stage. You'll help decide what the platform should provide, which approaches to adopt and how the team should grow as 9fin's AI ambitions develop. Your impact will reach across product teams. By building shared capabilities that engineers trust and choose to use, you'll help teams deliver AI products more quickly and operate them with confidence. You'll own both people leadership and technical direction, developing the team while remaining closely involved in the engineering decisions that determine the platform's success. ABOUT YOU This role will be a great fit if you: People Management - Have experience directly managing software engineers, including hiring, performance management and career development. - Can build a team with clear priorities, give useful feedback and support engineers to take ownership of their work. Platform Engineering - Have built shared platforms or developer tools that other engineering teams adopted, and understand what makes those teams successful. - Can translate product needs into reusable capabilities and balance immediate delivery with longer-term platform development. Production LLMs & Agentic AI - Have built or operated complex LLM-powered applications or agent systems in production. - Understand the challenges of non-deterministic systems, including evaluation, quality regressions, tool use, reliability, security and cost. Backend, Cloud & Operations - Have a strong backend or infrastructure engineering background, with ownership of distributed production systems in the cloud. - Understand how to operate services reliably, including monitoring, incident response, performance and cost management. Collaboration & Technical Leadership - Have the technical depth to review designs and code, assess alternatives and help engineers work through difficult problems. - Communicate trade-offs clearly, build effective partnerships across teams and use evidence to make decisions in ambiguous situations. BONUS POINTS Experience with any of the following would be highly advantageous: - Event-driven architectures or long-running asynchronous workloads - Secure execution environments and access controls - AI evaluation, experimentation or observability - Platforms handling sensitive data in finance or other high-trust environments BENEFITS We’re a scaling start up, and we enjoy sharing our success, when the company succeeds, we always reinvest that in our people. We also offer huge amounts of responsibility, an abundance of opportunity for growth and a platform to truly excel. Financial & Insurance - Competitive Salary (our salary bands are benchmarked at the top end of the market) - Equity - Pension (your minimum contributions are 4% with 9fin matching up to 7%) - Private Medical Insurance - Paid sick leave with Income Protection for long periods of illness - Group Life Assurance - Season Ticket Loan & Cycle to Work schemes Time off - 25 holiday days per year - Local public holidays (with the ability to exchange them for alternative days) - Work abroad for up to 3 months a year - 1 month paid sabbatical after 5 years of service - Enhanced parental leave & flexible working arrangements available Training & Culture - Professional learning and development budget - AI experimentation budget - Quarterly team socials - Su