Technical Director - AI Engineering

Location: UK

Type: Remote / Hybrid (our clients will expect us to be present when they are, and thus we will require commitment to be on-site within client environments where needed)

A few words about us:

Valtech is a global digital agency focused on enabling business transformation. We enable clients to anticipate tomorrow’s trends and connect more directly with their consumers across digital and physical touchpoints.

We deliver innovation with a purpose. With expertise across experience design, technology and marketing, our passion is in addressing transformational business challenges for our clients. Challenges where we re-imagine the customer journey and build new connected experiences. Challenges where we make data work in this new era and help our clients transform the way they operate and optimise business-critical digital platforms for multichannel commerce and marketing.

Operating across five continents with over 6,000 innovators in twenty-two countries, we help organisations reimagine the way they connect with their customers, leverage data, and transform their business operations.

The Role:

The Technical Director will play a key role in shaping and delivering large-scale, global transformation initiatives for our most strategic clients. You will lead a community of talented people who are enthusiastic about building best-in-class digital solutions.

This is a strategic leadership role, where you will be embedded within our largest clients. You will work with C-level stakeholders to imagine, shape, and deliver large-scale transformation initiatives whilst staying close enough to the teams who make it happen.

Our perfect candidate really cares about helping teams to make things better for users. They will be as credible as a coach and mentor for both colleagues and clients as they are as a technologist. Curiosity, critical thought, and an ability to get under the skin of our clients’ businesses will make this role seriously satisfying.

Strategic Client Leadership

• Build relationships with senior technology stakeholders within our clients’ businesses.
• Serve as the transformation lead for major enterprise clients, helping define, shape, and deliver vision, technology strategy, implementation, operating model amends, and revisions.
• Advance accounts through the identification of new opportunities, looking to ensure any upsell and cross sell opportunities are rooted in client business requirements and have robust ROI returns.
• AI product delivery operations strategy: recommend AI tooling and usage patterns that deliver measurable return on investment for our clients.
• AI product strategy: recommend the use of AI within clients’ products where appropriate, to deliver value for their customers and end users.
• Operating model reviews and design for AI adoption: centralised reuse of AI pipelines, skills repositories, and plug-ins across client engagements, and collaboration with wider teams beyond technology (delivery, strategy, and design) to establish centralised requirements and shared context for AI workflows.
• Drive strategic alignment across enterprise functions and digital workstreams, ensuring initiatives ladder up into a cohesive strategy.
• Ensure business strategy alignment with the work being delivered. Be accountable for the successful delivery of the work.
• Represent Valtech as a voice of authority and confidence and lead our clients through their initiatives with expert guidance becoming that trusted advisor to the client.
• Be the technical escalation point for issues within assigned clients, and be proactive in identifying and dealing with issues as soon as they arise.

Technical Leadership

• Provide first class technical leadership within the client environment; enable, guide and coach teams to navigate complexity and effectively deliver transformational programmes of work.
• Be an enabler for Artificial Intelligence adoption to drive efficiency and innovation for clients, acting as an agent of change within delivery teams and empowering them to use AI effectively in their day-to-day work.
• Consult with senior client stakeholders to advise on technology adoption to achieve outcomes.
• Identify, mentor, and develop future technical leaders within the assigned client delivery teams.
• Support and influence across delivery layers, from digital platforms and product teams to governance and business capabilities.
• Strengthen the technical presence and drive involvement within the global Valtech community around transformation matters and modern software delivery.
• Make transformation a reality by balancing strategic direction with continuous, on-the-ground progress.
• Bring industry knowledge into engagements, challenge internal assumptions and equip teams to solve big problems effectively.
• Drive training, evangelism, and excitement around AI products and product selection across delivery teams.
• Create a culture of sharing around AI adoption: surfacing what works and what doesn’t, forming clans and communities of practice to drive forward adoption, and operationalising the rollout of new AI tooling across teams.
• Exposure of internal systems and tooling to AI pipelines via MCP, CLIs, and equivalent integration patterns, with appropriate context-management strategies.
• Gather, generate, and synthesise strong opinions and thought leadership on technology trends. Align those trends against the business needs of Valtech and the clients.
• Support client engagements by aligning technical work with Valtech and client technology, security, and certification standards and ensure technical standards and processes are upheld, delivering best-in-class solutions.
• Ensure governance and decision-making processes are effective.

People

• Help teams adopt good practices and techniques to deliver quality software at pace.
• Advocate for delivery methods (especially agile) and their impact on technology planning/strategy.
• Ensure teams consider risks, impacts, and consequences of decisions.
• Assist recruitment teams in talent acquisition aligned to the needs of client projects and alignment to Valtech’s Culture and People Growth Framework.
• Validate hiring processes and ensure team composition meets delivery requirements.
• Line manage and develop people through our Professional Development Processes and our People Growth Framework.
• Foster an environment of psychological safety, grasping every opportunity for ongoing and continuous improvement, turning all problems into opportunities to gain experience and grow.
• Support teams through the change brought by AI adoption, helping individuals navigate evolving ways of working.
• Set personal development plans that reflect AI capability growth alongside core technical and consulting skills.
• Leverage certifications and partner programmes, feeding these into individual training plans and demonstrating the value back to clients and partners.

Partners

• Build deep relationships with our technical partners, our client's technical partners and stay abreast of their developments and roadmaps to inform strategic decisions.
• Support and sponsor technical events.
• Be seen as an advocate and thought leader for the technologies we implement on behalf of our partners.

Growth

• Support sales, marketing, and account management teams to explore growth opportunities within clients.
• Contribute to bids, proposals and pitches, ensuring technical alignment and excellence.
• Share insights and learning from client work to influence our local and global approaches to transformation.
• Shape go-to-market strategies for our AI propositions, including positioning, packaging, and target client segments.
• Define and evidence return-on-investment narratives for AI adoption with clients.
• Develop core pitch materials and reusable collateral around our AI approaches, methodologies, and case studies.

Essential Expertise:

• A proven record of leading large-scale, transformation projects for globally recognised brand names
• Experience navigating large, complex organisations to connect silos and align multiple workstreams.
• Proven consulting skills and the ability to influence C-level stakeholders with both credibility and humility.

·        Use of AI in enterprise software development.

• Use of AI in enterprise products and technology.
• Technical fluency across platforms, architecture, cloud, and modern delivery practices.
• Enthusiastic about technology, developing teams, and delivering successful outcomes.
• Proven record building and leading communities of technologists
• Adaptable to change and fostering cultural shifts within the organisation.

Technology domains we are particularly interested in talking to you about:

• Technical leadership in a Product environment
• AI pipelines across the software development lifecycle, spanning the plan, implement, test, and verify stages.
• Spec-driven development practices.
• Centralised skills and reuse across teams and projects.
• Tooling experience with the Anthropic Claude Code suite, including agents, sub-agents, and agent-team workflows.
• AI-assisted delivery across the full lifecycle:.
• AI governance: risk management for AI systems, PII exposure controls for systems feeding AI pipelines, EU AI Act 2024 compliance and DPIAs for client-driven systems, and alignment of AI processes with information-security standards such as ISO 27001 and 42001.
• AI product engineering: designing and building AI-native products for clients.
• MCP architectures and agentic architectures for tool use and orchestration.
• Model selection and fine-tuning strategies aligned to use case, cost, and performance.
• Prompt management, context management, and chunking strategies for retrieval and long-context workloads.
• Conversational interfaces, natural language, and voice as primary user experiences.
• DevSecOps culture.
• Continuous integration/delivery/deployment.
• Infrastructure automation and the evolution of infrastructure.
• Cloud experience in a major hyper-scaler (Google, Microsoft, and/or AWS)
• Secure by design principles

What can you expect from us:

 

At Valtech you will become part of our exceptional team of more than 6,000 talented innovators, design thinkers, creatives, and engineers.

We interact across countries, disciplines, trades, roles, and teams. We are consultants before anything else and take ownership of our own work, clients, and careers. We provide everyone with a large degree of freedom - in return, we expect an equally high degree of accountability and dedication.

We transform by doing and are insanely enthusiastic about improving the end user experience.

We are a people company. We share our knowledge and learnings; we dare to speak up and take risks.

And we care deeply about one another, our clients, and the world around us.

We have from our very beginning always worked hard on providing everyone within our organisation the opportunity to gain experience and transform their job opportunities and career paths across the world.

From graduates to seasoned professionals who are experts in their field. Valtech will always be recognised not just for the quality of the work we deliver, but for all the amazing people that make it happen. We do not just talk about how to get things done; we really do transform by doing.

 

Valtech Benefits:

 

Here at Valtech we are big believers that our staff are our most important asset, and as such we want to make sure we look after you.

As well as all the usual corporate benefits (hybrid & flexible working, pension, life insurance, 25 days holiday, phone, laptop, BUPA private healthcare & dental etc), we pride ourselves on our commitment to continuous learning and development, which means you’ll have a clear growth and development path, alongside access to professional coaching and online learning courses.

You’ll be joining an inclusive and diverse workforce, working on genuinely exciting projects with collaborative teams at a local and global level, with a big focus on health and social well-being, Cycle to Work Scheme, Employee Assistance Programme, eye tests, Flu Jab, regular Company Days, and staff parties). 

 

Recruitment Process:

 

We appreciate that interviews can be daunting. At Valtech we aim to make the interview process an approachable, two-way conversation, which allows us to get to know you and for you to get to know us. As part of our efforts to ensure the recruitment process is fair and consistent, we have put in place measures and initiatives to ensure we are not rating people differently due to our own bias.

If you would like to know more about our recruitment framework, click here.