Commercial Lending AI Platform Lead - NatWest Group

Join us as a Commercial Lending AI Platform Lead, Director

• Lead the delivery of a major commercial lending transformation, building an innovative agentic AI platform that will support lending and wider bank technology needs over the next 3 to 4 years
• Own the end-to-end strategy, design, architecture, and execution of AI platforms across lending, ensuring they meet business, technology, and customer requirements
• Provide leadership and accountability for platform change, operations, risk, security, resilience, service management, and lifecycle management, driving simplification, stability, and efficiency across the AI estate

What you'll do
In this high-impact role, you will lead the strategic vision and roadmap for the Commercial Lending AI Platform, ensuring alignment with business priorities, technology strategy and emerging AI innovation. You will own the architecture and engineering strategy for Matrix and the wider AI platform ecosystem, establishing scalable, secure and resilient capabilities that accelerate AI adoption across Lending.
You will be responsible for designing and delivering enterprise-grade agentic AI platform capabilities, including orchestration frameworks, agent lifecycle management, model and tool integration, retrieval architectures, governance controls, observability and operational controls. Driving engineering excellence will be a key focus, embedding modern software engineering practices, automation, reliability engineering and operational excellence at scale.
Working closely with senior business stakeholders, product owners, architects and engineering leaders, you will translate business outcomes into scalable technology solutions. You will oversee the full platform lifecycle, from design and implementation through to operations, risk management and continuous improvement, while embedding a strong culture of security and responsible AI.
You'll also be:

• Optimising the scheduling and sequencing of initiatives to achieve delivery, platform adoption, engineering quality, risk and cost objectives
• Leading multidisciplinary engineering, platform and architecture teams responsible for critical AI services and capabilities
• Ensuring the stability, availability, performance and resilience of AI platforms, infrastructure and tooling
• Aligning technology solutions to customer needs, business outcomes and enterprise strategy, while promoting simplification, standardisation and reuse
• Establishing reusable platform services, standards, frameworks and engineering patterns to support AI delivery across multiple domains
• Owning the platform's financial, commercial and operational performance, proactively driving improvements
• Representing the platform and technology strategy at executive forums, influencing senior stakeholders across business, technology, risk and architecture communities

The skills you'll need
This role is not a traditional AI product, delivery, or data science leadership position. We are looking for a proven technology leader with significant experience delivering large-scale AI, platform or cloud-native solutions in complex enterprise environments. You will bring deep expertise in platform architecture, modern engineering practices and agentic AI technologies, with a track record of building scalable, secure and resilient platforms that support multiple teams and business domains.
The ideal candidate will combine strong technical and architectural leadership with commercial acumen, stakeholder management expertise and experience operating in regulated environments. You will bring deep technical credibility and hands-on experience delivering agentic AI platforms into production, with a proven track record of enabling organisations to adopt and scale AI safely, securely and effectively at enterprise scale. You will have successfully delivered complex transformation programmes, managed risk and governance requirements, and be passionate about using AI innovation to drive long-term business value and competitive advantage.
You'll also be expected to have:

• Experience establishing AI platform operating models, engineering standards, governance frameworks and reusable technology capabilities
• Strong knowledge of enterprise AI, machine learning and agentic AI technologies, including their application in large-scale production environments
• Hands-on experience delivering AI platforms that support model serving, agent orchestration, observability, evaluation, governance and operational management
• Expertise in leading large, complex technology programmes spanning multiple teams, disciplines and governance forums
• Strong operational, risk, financial management, collaboration and negotiation skills.
• The ability to operate credibly as both a senior technology executive and a hands-on technical leader