AI Engineering Lead, GenAI Platform
9fin is hiring an AI Engineering Lead, GenAI Platform in London, United Kingdom. Level rates it ; you can apply on 9fin.
Level's read on this job
- Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this AI engineer role: the job is building AI systems.
- The posting mentions GenAI Platform, APIs and AI evaluation among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a lead role.
- 9fin has 30 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Lead the GenAI Platform engineering team to build scalable shared AI foundations and agent infrastructure for debt markets.
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
Summer and Winter company social events
Hybrid Policy
9fin is a hybrid company, and the office is a regular part of how we work. From January 2027, all employees will work from their designated 9fin office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Some teams may be asked to be in the office more often, where the nature of their work calls for it. For the rest of the week, you may work from wherever works best for you and your team. Your Talent Partner will share hybrid working details for this role.
9fin is an equal opportunities employer
At 9fin we are dedicated to building and promoting a fair and inclusive workplace where everyone can reach their full potential and truly belong. We recognize that building diverse teams enables a more creative and productive environment. If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t perfectly align with the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You might just be who we’re looking for — either for this role, or perhaps another.
How we rate this
AI Engineering Lead, GenAI Platform at 9fin rates 90 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Pay
- Typical AI engineer job
- $185k
This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical AI engineer figure when pay comes up. See AI engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide that one model's output is better than another's for a given task?
- Tell me about a project where generative ai was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where team leadership was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where software architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where python was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Evaluation, Generative AI, Team Leadership, Software Architecture, and Python. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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