Technical Director AI

Technical Director - AI Engineering

Location: UK wide

Type: Hybrid - office/client/home

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.

We are proud of:

• The work we do and innovation we drive

• Our Values of share, care and dare

• A workplace culture that fosters creativity, diversity and autonomy

• Our borderless, global framework, which enables seamless collaboration

The Role:

You will be a key decision maker in Valtech’s UK AI transformation, and a member of the UK Technology, Data and AI Leadership Team that leads on all things AI. 

You will be accountable for AI policy across product and operations within our Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC), defining how AI is responsibly adopted and turning that policy into everyday practice for our teams and clients. You will also be Valtech’s key UK relationship lead for our Anthropic partnership.

Alongside this, you will lead large-scale, global transformation for our most strategic clients and a community of talented people passionate about building best-in-class digital solutions. Embedded within our largest clients, you will work with C-level stakeholders whilst staying close to the teams who make it happen.

Our perfect candidate really cares about helping teams make things better for users, and is as credible as a coach and mentor 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, shaping and delivering vision, technology strategy, implementation, and operating model changes.

• Grow accounts by identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities that are rooted in client business requirements and have robust ROI.

• Align enterprise functions and digital workstreams so initiatives ladder up into a cohesive strategy.

• Be accountable for the successful delivery of the work.

• Represent Valtech with authority and confidence, guiding clients through their initiatives as their trusted advisor.

• Be the technical escalation point for assigned clients, identifying and resolving issues as soon as they arise.

• 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.

• Design human/AI collaboration models with clients and teams, defining where people stay in the loop (reviewing and approving AI outputs) and over the loop (setting guardrails and supervising autonomous AI workflows).
• Operating model reviews and design for AI adoption: centralised reuse of AI pipelines and accelerators (skills, plug-ins, and hooks) across client engagements, and collaboration with delivery, strategy, and design teams to establish centralised requirements and shared context for AI workflows.

Technical Leadership

• Provide first-class technical leadership in the client environment, enabling and coaching teams to navigate complexity and deliver transformational programmes of work.

• Enable AI adoption to drive efficiency and innovation for clients, acting as an agent of change and empowering delivery teams to use AI effectively day to day.

• Advise senior client stakeholders 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 technical presence and involvement in the global Valtech community on transformation 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 and evangelism around AI products and product selection, and build a culture of sharing: surfacing what works and what doesn’t, forming clans and communities of practice, 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.

• Own Valtech’s centralised library of AI accelerators (skills, plug-ins, hooks, and workflow templates), setting standards for how they are built, versioned, and governed, and driving their reuse across teams and client engagements.

• Generate thought leadership on technology trends and align it with the business needs of Valtech and our clients.

• Align technical work with Valtech and client technology, security, and certification standards, and uphold technical standards and processes to deliver best-in-class solutions.
• Ensure governance and decision-making processes are effective, including AI policy applied consistently across teams and client engagements.

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 in acquiring talent aligned to client project needs and 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 psychological safety and continuous improvement, turning 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

• Act as Valtech’s key UK point of contact for our Anthropic partnership, shaping joint enablement, go-to-market, and delivery plans.

• Build deep relationships with our technical partners and our clients’ technical partners, staying abreast of their roadmaps to inform strategic decisions.

• Support and sponsor technical events.
• Be an advocate and thought leader for the technologies we implement with 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, return-on-investment narratives, and target client segments.
• 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.

• 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.

• Use of AI in enterprise software development, products and technology.
• Experience leading AI adoption and policy in a consultancy or agency environment, balancing client delivery with internal capability building.

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.

• Human/AI collaboration design, including human-in-the-loop and human-over-the-loop patterns.

• Tooling experience with the Anthropic Claude Code suite, including agents, sub-agents, skills, plug-ins, hooks, and agent-team workflows.

• 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 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.

From our very beginning we have worked hard to give everyone in our organisation the opportunity to gain experience and transform their careers 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.

Valtech Benefits:

We believe our people are our most important asset, so 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 are committed to continuous learning and development, with a clear growth path and 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, so we aim to make ours an approachable, two-way conversation where we get to know each other. To keep recruitment fair and consistent, we have measures in place to ensure we do not rate people differently due to our own bias. 

Once you apply, our Talent Acquisition team will review your application. If your skills and experience align with the role, we’ll reach out for next steps.

⚠️ Beware of recruitment fraud: Only engage with official Valtech email addresses ending in @valtech.com.

We are committed to inclusion and accessibility. If you need reasonable accommodations during the interview process, please either indicate it in your application or let your Talent Partner know.

About Valtech

Valtech is the experience innovation company that exists to unlock a better way to experience the world. By blending crafts, categories, and cultures, we help brands unlock new value in an increasingly digital world.

At the intersection of data, AI, creativity, and technology, we drive transformation for leading organizations, including L’Oréal, Mars, Audi, P&G, Volkswagen Dolby, and more.

At Valtech, we don’t just talk about transformation. We make it happen. Our people are the heart of our success, and we foster a workplace where everyone has the support to thrive, grow and innovate.

Are you ready to create what’s next? Join us.