Allica Bank is a London-based digital challenger bank that provides current accounts, lending, and savings products to established small and medium-sized businesses.
About Allica Bank Allica is the UK’s fastest growing company - and the fastest-growing financial technology (Fintech) firm ever. Our purpose is to help established SMEs, one of the last major underserved opportunities in Fintech. Established SMEs are the backbone of local communities - representing over a third of our economy - yet have been largely neglected both by traditional high street banks and modern fintech providers. Department Description Lending to SMEs is Allica’s primary revenue stream, and the lending product teams are central to ensuring that Allica’s organic SME lending has a sustained competitive advantage against its peers, due to superior features, processes, technology and data. Whilst a lot of the market aims to avoid the complex nature of SME businesses, we are going for it head on, designing simple and efficient solutions to the most complex problems to provide excellent and efficient customer experience. We are building best in class products and platforms, which will allow us to scale quickly to serve more UK SMEs economically. Role Description The Senior Product Engineer will bring together innovative product design and thinking, alongside building suitable technical solutions for our customers, with an emphasis of utilizing different forms of AI in both ways of working and what we build within the lending product area. The focus of the role will be a combination of product discovery and design as well as managing the complete engineering lifecycle of the product to deployment. This role will create significant value for Allica by building agentic AI capability within lending that drives our growth further, while improving risk and productivity – with the objective of scaling up initial experimentation to significantly scaled Lending solutions. This is a hands-on role, working closely with the rest of the Lending product area, and also with various teams across the bank that drive our Lending to customers, including distribution, underwriting and operations. You will experiment and then develop solutions that improve our lending prospecting, application, credit underwriting and operational processes across products and channels. You will bring deep expertise in LLMs, prompt engineering, agent frameworks, and systems thinking along with the ability to translate into solving real world problems at scale and with a user experience focus. This is a high-impact technical product role with clear business outcomes. You’ll drive the end-to-end delivery of solutions—from idea to production—and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of how we scale Allica using AI within Lending. Principal Accountabilities - Deliver performance: Support delivery of the key business performance indicators for the Autonomous Lending tribe - Product discovery: Drive end-to-end solution design and delivery for components of our commercial lending origination journey, working with the Tribe lead, various internal and external users and clients to build best-in-class experience - Experimentation & Iteration: Rapidly prototype AI applications, run experiments to test impact, and iterate based on usage data and feedback - Build: Design and build AI-driven solutions to significantly improve customer experience and growth opportunity for the bank, while automating manual processes and reducing risk in the journey - Prioritization: Manage the roadmap for the capabilities you are building - Development: Design, develop and deploy the microservices into production for end users. Work along with the team to achieve Continuous integration, deployment and delivery - AI Safety & Explainability: Apply best practices in responsible AI deployment, ensuring explainability, compliance, and ethical use of LLMs in production environments - Risk management: Balance growth responsibly with risk management, following governance best practices across product, engineering and data, while driving innovation Personal Attributes & Experience Personal Attributes: - Deeply curious, proactive, and impact-driven with a strong bias for action and experimentation - Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-paced environments where the problem is as novel as the solution - Strong sense of ownership/ pro-activeness - Collaborative and communicative, able to translate technical ideas into business language and influence stakeholders - Good understanding of well-architected Framework and should be able to demonstrate how to apply them - Passionate about the potential of AI to change how businesses work and how customers interact with products Experience & Technical Skills: - Proven experience building and deploying LLM-powered tools or agents (e.g., using OpenAI, Claude, or open-source models) - Hands-on expertise in Python, LLM frameworks (LangChain, Semantic Kernel, etc.), prompt engineering, and orchestration - Previous experience with Event-Driven Microservice Architecture - Experience integrating AI solutions into real-world systems - Strong understanding of vector databases, RAG (retrieval augmented generation), and agent workflows - Understanding of privacy, bias, and safety considerations when applying LLMs in production - Demonstrable experience with Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) - Exposure to commercial lending is a plus - Exposure to Azure cloud will be beneficial Working at Allica Bank At Allica Bank we want to ensure our employees have the right tools and environment in which to succeed in their role and in support of our customers. Our employees are at the heart of everything we do, so our benefits are designed with you in mind: - Full onboarding support and continued development opportunities - Options for flexible working - Regular social activities - Pension contributions - Discretionary bonus scheme - Private health cover - Life assurance - Family friendly policies including enhanced Maternity & Paternity l