Sr. Associate Director, Software Engineering (Group AI Platform SME)

Own and deliver difficult engineering problems across core AI platform domains, including AI gateway capabilities, security guardrails, retrieval-augmented generation and agentic platform services. Design and implement production-grade services in Go (Golang), with strong focus on concurrency, latency, throughput, fault tolerance and maintainability. Make sound technical decisions in areas such as service boundaries, interface design, failure handling, observability, rollout safety and long-term operability. Drive implementation quality through disciplined engineering practices, including code review, automated testing, performance validation, secure software design and clear technical documentation. Convert loosely defined requirements or emerging platform needs into clear designs, delivery slices and durable technical solutions. Work closely with principal engineers and peer engineers to challenge assumptions, refine designs and improve the overall quality of platform architecture and execution. Contribute as a high-trust individual contributor who raises standards through technical depth, consistent delivery, practical mentoring and example-setting rather than formal line management. Experience designing or operating gateway platforms, service control planes or application programming interface (API) mediation layers in complex enterprise environments. Familiarity with security controls for AI systems, including policy enforcement, access control, auditability, model governance and runtime guardrails. Practical understanding of retrieval-augmented generation architectures, including ingestion pipelines, embeddings, retrieval strategies, ranking and evaluation of answer quality. Experience with agentic systems or platforms used to build, orchestrate and govern production-ready AI agents. Working knowledge of Golang and/or Python for platform tooling, integration, experimentation or adjacent service development. Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native production systems, including deployment patterns, networking, scaling, resilience and operational troubleshooting. Track record of improving engineering organisations through design reviews, technical standards, shared frameworks or uplift of peer engineering capability.