Job description

JOB SUMMARY / 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.

  
  

  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.
  Strong hands-on knowledge of agent orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, Google ADK, LlamaIndex, Autogen, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, or equivalent), planning and reasoning loops, multi-agent coordination patterns, agent memory systems, and evaluation harnesses (RAGAS, OPIK, LangSmith, Promptfoo, or equivalent).
• Deep technical knowledge of LLM serving and inference architecture, including managed model APIs (Azure AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Vertex AI), provisioned throughput / PTUs, self-hosted open-weight models, GPU scheduling, vLLM / TGI / Triton, KV-cache management, batching strategies, and the cost-latency-quality trade-offs that drive model selection.
• Strong working expertise in LLM gateway and AI gateway architecture, including model routing, fallback and retry, prompt and semantic caching, rate limiting, tenant isolation, token accounting, and policy enforcement at the gateway boundary.
• Deep experience in retrieval and knowledge architecture, including vector databases (pgvector, Azure AI Search, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, or equivalent), hybrid retrieval, reranking, embeddings model selection, knowledge graphs (FIBO, RDF, OWL, SHACL, Neo4j, Apache Jena), and context engineering at scale.
  Strong grounding in agent and workload identity, including non-human identity (NHI) governance, agent identity lifecycle, OAuth 2.1, OIDC, SPIFFE / SPIRE-style workload identity, mTLS, just-in-time credentialing, secret-less architectures, and integration with enterprise IAM (Microsoft Entra ID, Azure AD, PAM platforms).
• Deep proficiency in cloud-native platform engineering on Azure (preferred) and AWS, including Terraform, Kubernetes (AKS / EKS), Helm, service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), API gateways (APIM, Kong, Envoy), private networking, and policy-as-code (OPA, Azure Policy).
  Strong programming proficiency in at least one of Python, Go, or Java, with active engagement in code reviews, design reviews, and platform-level engineering decisions.
• Strong Site Reliability Engineering background, including production on-call, incident leadership, post-mortem discipline, SLO and error-budget design, capacity planning, and observability tooling (Open Telemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent) tuned for non-deterministic AI workloads.
  Working knowledge of integration patterns relevant to banking platforms, including event-driven architectures (Kafka, Event Hubs), API gateways, ESB, ISO 20022, payment rails, and core banking integration patterns.
• Strong grounding in security engineering for regulated industries, including OWASP LLM Top 10, prompt injection defence, model supply-chain security, secrets management, network segmentation, data residency, and audit logging.
  Engineering Leadership & Collaboration
• Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in a two-in-a-box model with another senior technical owner, including shared accountability, shared on-call, and shared decision-making.
• Track record of raising engineering standards across a platform team through standards, design reviews, documentation, and direct technical mentorship.
  Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to engage credibly with engineers, architects, risk and audit functions, hyperscaler and vendor technical teams, and senior business stakeholders.
  Minimum Experience
• 10+ years in software and platform engineering, with significant time spent at senior, staff, or principal engineering / architect level.
  Demonstrated production ownership of at least one platform serving multiple internal or external consumers at enterprise scale, ideally including agentic or LLM workloads.

• Substantive experience in financial services, banking, or another comparably regulated industry.
  Demonstrated SRE and on-call experience on a production platform with meaningful availability and operational requirements.
  Track record of building, integrating, or operating LLM-based or agentic systems in production.

  
  

  Minimum Qualifications

  
  

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

  
  

  Preferred / Beneficial

  
  
• Master's degree (MSc / MTech / MEng) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Distributed Systems, or a related discipline preferred.
• Relevant professional certifications in cloud engineering (Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, AWS DevOps Professional, AWS
• Solutions Architect Professional, Certified Kubernetes Administrator), security (CISSP, CCSP), or SRE considered an advantage.

About Us:
First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) is the largest bank in the UAE and one of the world's largest and safest financial institutions. We offer a comprehensive range of personal and private banking services, including credit cards, Islamic banking, investments, loans, and mortgages. Our commitment to excellence and innovation drives us to provide top-tier financial solutions to our clients.
Life at FAB:
Working at FAB means being part of a team of talented and passionate individuals with a shared vision to support the ambitions of our stakeholders to "Grow Stronger." We embrace the needs of our customers across the globe with a sense of responsibility and confidence driven by extensive expertise that can only be delivered by an ambitious world-class organization
Career Development:
FAB offers unique career choices, a chance to innovate, craft solutions for the future, and express yourself in a performance-based culture that will unleash the best in you. Whether you are an experienced professional or just starting your career, FAB provides a range of learning and development initiatives to support all employees through training and skill development.
Our Values:
At FAB, we place our customers at the core of our activities, live our values each day in every way, celebrate achievements, and empower each other to deliver leading solutions. We have structured plans for the recruitment and career progression of Emirati talent to enable them to make a mark in the financial and banking sector both regionally and globaly that rewards your hard work and dedication.
Join our team and be part of a journey to shape the future of banking.