Senior Engineer, Platform Engineering and Architecture

/ INTRODUCTION To lead the engineering, architecture, and run-state ownership of the bank's enterprise AI & Agentic Platform, ensuring it operates as a reliable, secure, observable, and bank-grade production platform supporting agents and AI workloads across the Group. The role is the senior technical authority for platform engineering and architecture across the agentic runtime, model gateway, integration fabric, identity layer, and infrastructure backbone of the platform. It operates in a two-in-a-box model with the existing Platform Product Owner to provide concurrent technical ownership and organizational resilience for the platform, with shared accountability for platform availability, performance, cost, security posture, and architectural evolution. The role is deeply technical in nature, requiring hands-on engineering depth across distributed systems, agentic protocols, LLM infrastructure, identity and access management, and cloud-native platform engineering. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES Key Accountabilities Platform Architecture Own the end-to-end technical architecture of the AI & Agentic Platform's five-layer stack: Action Gateway, Agent Kernel, Control Plane, Knowledge Foundation, and the Users and Channels layer. Architect and evolve the agentic runtime to natively support the emerging multi-protocol stack: Model Context Protocol (MCP) for agent-to-tool access, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) for inter-agent coordination and task delegation, Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) and equivalent emerging standards, ensuring the platform is interoperable with hyperscaler agent fabrics (Azure AI Foundry agents, AWS Bedrock Agents, Google ADK). Design the platform's agent kernel, including agent lifecycle management, planning and reasoning loops, memory architecture (short-term, long-term, episodic), state management, session affinity, scratchpad persistence, and execution chains. Architect the platform's knowledge foundation, including vector store selection and topology, hybrid retrieval (BM25, dense, graph), embeddings strategy, knowledge graph integration (FIBO, OWL, SHACL, SPARQL), context engineering, and grounding patterns. Design the platform's control plane, including policy-gated execution, Know Your Agent (KYA) enforcement at runtime, agent registries, tool registries, capability discovery, evaluation pipelines, and tracing and lineage at agent and tool granularity. Key Accountabilities Integrations & Model Layer Architect and engineer the platform's LLM gateway and model abstraction layer, providing a unified interface across foundation model providers (Azure AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Vertex AI, Cohere) with intelligent routing, fallback, retries, prompt and response caching, semantic caching, rate limiting, token accounting, cost attribution, and tenant isolation. Design model serving patterns for managed APIs, dedicated capacity (PTUs / provisioned throughput), and self-hosted open-weight models on GPU infrastructure (vLLM, TGI, Triton, or equivalent), with appropriate trade-offs across cost, latency, sovereignty, and compliance. Lead the integration architecture between the AI Platform and the bank's core estate, including core banking, payments, treasury, credit and risk systems, the enterprise data platform (Azure, Cloudera, Databricks), enterprise APIs, ESB, event streaming (Kafka, Event Hubs), and the data product layer. Design the action gateway as the bank's enforcement boundary for agentic action, including API mediation, contract enforcement, circuit breakers, idempotency guarantees, transactional safety, and audit-grade action logging. Engineer the platform's tool layer and MCP server estate, including tool packaging, versioning, capability advertisement, schema enforcement, and runtime tool discovery across Wholesale, Retail, and Group functions. Key Accountabilities Identity, Security & Governance Architect and own the agent identity and workload identity model for the platform, including non-human identity (NHI) management, agent identity lifecycle, blended user-plus-agent identity for delegated actions, and the identity propagation chain across multi-agent flows. Design the platform's authentication and authorization architecture, including OAuth 2.1 and OIDC flows for agent-to-tool and agent-to-API interactions, just-in-time credential issuance, short-lived token exchange, mTLS for agent-to-agent communication, and integration with the bank's enterprise IAM (Microsoft Entra ID, PAM, secrets management). Implement zero-trust principles across the agentic stack, including least-privilege scoping per agent and per task, real-time policy evaluation, behavioral posture checks, and continuous authorization rather than static service-account-style access. Engineer the platform's runtime governance controls, including KYA enforcement, prompt and output guardrails (PII, PHI, MNPI, prompt injection defense), sensitive action approval flows, and human-in-the-loop escalation patterns. Harden the platform to meet CBUAE, internal model risk, and Group governance requirements, including auditability, lineage, data residency, model risk controls, third-party model governance, and OWASP LLM Top 10 alignment. Key Accountabilities Infrastructure & Run-State Lead the platform's cloud and infrastructure architecture across Azure (primary) and AWS, including infrastructure as code (Terraform), networking (private endpoints, peering, egress control), Kubernetes (AKS) and container orchestration, secrets management, and CI/CD pipelines. Own platform Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), including SLO design, error budget management, observability (OpenTelemetry, traces, metrics, logs at agent and tool granularity), incident response, post-mortems, capacity planning, and cost governance for a growing fleet of agents and AI workloads in production. Operate in genuine two-in-a-box with the existing Platform Product Owner, including shared on-call, shared roadmap ownership, and shared accountability for major architectural decisions, regulator conversations, and critical incidents. Drive engineering excellence across the platform team, including testing discipline (unit, integration, evaluation, red-teaming), documentation, infrastructure as code maturity, operational readiness reviews, and technical mentorship of platform engineers. Represent the platform in senior technical forums with Enterprise Architecture, Cyber, Model Risk, Internal Audit, and the Group CTTO's office on architecture and engineering matters. Engage with hyperscale, model provider, and framework vendor technical teams on platform-level integration, performance, sovereignty, and cost optimization.

Desired Candidate Profile

REQUIREMENTS / QUALIFICATIONS Technical Expertise Deep, current expertise in agentic AI architecture and the modern multi-protocol stack: Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), and the engineering patterns required to build interoperable agentic systems on top of them at platform scale.