AI Specialist (AI Foundry) - 3 Days Work from Office - Leeds or Bradford

WNS (Holdings) Limited (NYSE: WNS), is a leading Business Process Management (BPM) company. We combine our deep industry knowledge with technology and analytics expertise to co-create innovative, digital-led transformational solutions with clients across 10 industries. We enable businesses in Travel, Insurance, Banking and Financial Services, Manufacturing, Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods, Shipping and Logistics, Healthcare, and Utilities to re-imagine their digital future and transform their outcomes with operational excellence. We deliver an entire spectrum of BPM services in finance and accounting, procurement, customer interaction services and human resources leveraging collaborative models that are tailored to address the unique business challenges of each client. We co-create and execute the future vision of 400+ clients with the help of our 66,000+ employees.

Purpose of the role:  To provide deep subject‑matter expertise within the AI Centre of Enablement, managing the shaping, design and governance of advanced AI, data and agentic AI solutions. The role drives innovation across copilots, cloud‑based AI services, RAG architectures and multi‑agent systems, while ensuring every solution is secure, scalable, compliant and underpinned by robust architectural principles.

Key Accountabilities

Role Specific Accountabilities

• Translate complex concepts into clear guidance for executives and governance forums.
• Contribute to AI strategy, roadmap and horizon‑scanning, informing investment and risk posture.
• Provide insight to support business cases, investment decisions, risk assessments, and prioritisation discussions at AI governance forums.
• Lead enterprise‑wide assurance for high‑risk AI systems, conducting deep reviews, assessing model and agent behaviour under stress conditions, identifying systemic risks, and recommending design‑level mitigations to ensure solutions remain robust, ethical and compliant.
• Serve as the subject matter expert on AI technologies, including large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI, providing insights and recommendations to support business cases and investment decisions.
• Lead exploration and proof‑of‑concepts for multi‑agent, tool‑using and semi‑autonomous workflows.
• Define enterprise AI patterns for orchestration, prompt governance, vector search, memory and agent frameworks.
• Act as a key influencer and advisor to senior management and governance forums, providing expert guidance on AI-related decisions and strategies.
• Advise on model selection, prompting strategies, data approaches and trade‑offs for safe, high‑performing solutions.
• Mentor and develop AI capabilities within the organization, uplifting the skills and expertise of delivery resources and ensuring the successful implementation of AI initiatives
• Shape and govern agentic AI patterns (memory, planning, tool use, autonomy constraints, escalation).
• Guide RAG implementations, vector databases, embedding pipelines and content governance models.
• Ensure strong data foundations (quality, lineage, metadata, privacy, access controls) for AI workloads.
• Drive cross‑functional technical AI enablement by developing advanced tooling, accelerators and evaluation frameworks, enabling teams to experiment safely, adopt best‑practice AI patterns, and scale AI delivery with higher consistency and lower technical debt.
• Provide robust technical challenge of vendors and models with evidence, benchmarking and risk assessment.
• Define standards, guardrails, and reusable frameworks for Copilot/LLM/agentic solutions.
• Support delivery of high‑risk/novel initiatives as a deep technical contributor and escalation point.
• Mentor delivery resources to uplift AI capability.
• Managing escalations and deputising for Senior Manager where required, and supporting the wider Data & AI Leadership team.

Shared Accountabilities

• Translate Divisional priorities into plans and deliverables to deliver overall Group strategic priorities
• Build the capability & capacity of functional resources to drive sustained commercial success.
• Interpret & communicate the priorities for the Function, motivating and developing a high performing team.
• Own functional priorities, applying specialist expertise to put the customer at the heart of everything and drive a profitable business.
• Initiate and develop critical external and internal relationships which create value, collaborating to deliver commercial and customer priorities.
• Uphold corporate legal & regulatory responsibilities.
• Implement and manage transformation activity & harness innovation to create a high performing & sustainable business

Functional/Technical (Role Specific)

Essential

Higher education qualification (or equivalent experience) in Ethics, Law, Risk Management, Social Sciences, Data/Computer Science or relevant field

• Proven experience applying deep technical expertise across AI, ML, LLMs, agentic AI, and applied AI engineering, driving the design, evaluation, and governance of advanced AI solutions
• Proven experience designing, evaluating and governing multi‑agent systems, incorporating memory structures, tool‑use orchestration, planning algorithms and autonomy controls.
• Demonstrated ability to benchmark LLM performance, evaluate model choices, run structured behavioural testing and interpret model outputs to inform safe and effective deployment.
• Strong understanding of responsible AI principles, ethical risk, regulatory expectations, and mitigation strategies, and the ability to translate them into practical safeguards.
• Strong understanding of cloud‑native AI solutions and proven experience delivering solutions on Azure, AWS and Google Cloud, ensuring alignment to enterprise standards, security controls and platform guardrails.
• Demonstrated ability to engineer and optimise RAG’s, including vector database design, embedding strategies, retrieval optimisation and advanced orchestration patterns for accuracy and reliability.
• Strong understanding of data engineering, governance, lineage, data quality and privacy frameworks, ensuring AI workloads are built on compliant, high‑integrity data foundations.
• Proven experience designing secure, resilient and scalable AI, embedding security‑by‑design, operational guardrails and platform‑level controls.
• Strong ability to challenge solution designs, model selections and vendor proposals, using evidence‑based critique, benchmarking and review.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex AI, concepts in clear, concise terms for senior leaders, governance forums and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in fast‑changing, ambiguous technical environments, providing clear direction, informed judgement and architectural leadership.
• Proven experience mentoring uplifting AI capability and embedding repeatable best‑practice patterns across teams.

Excellent stakeholder management and communication

Sector (desirable)

Understanding of financial services industry, markets and competitors

Understanding of how financial services organisations operate and the associated regulatory environment, or other regulated industries

Awareness of the Mutual Sector and the needs and interests of Members