AI Governance Engineering Lead

This is an engineering role. Janus Henderson is undertaking a firm-wide AI transformation to become the most technologically sophisticated asset manager in the industry, and it has to move quickly inside boundaries that actually hold. Your job is to make those boundaries part of the platform — governance as code and by design, so that engineers and users inherit the right behaviour automatically instead of passing through a review queue at the end.

You will sit within AI Technology and report to the Head of AI Technology. You will not be the firm’s expert on AI regulation, and you do not need to be: Risk has a dedicated AI governance specialist who owns regulatory interpretation, policy, and standards, and Infosec owns security policy and security-control approval. You will work with both, day to day. What we need from you is the engineering half of that partnership — the person who can take what a risk, legal, privacy, or audit specialist tells them they need, work out what it means in a system, and build it.

The controls you build land on our two central platforms: Nexus, our agentic workspace, where employees and citizen developers build and run AI applications, agents, and shared skills; and Accio, our centralised MCP server, which consumes other MCP servers and presents enterprise datasets through one governed interface. In practice that means identity and permissions for agents and tools, policy-as-code and deployment gates, evaluation hooks in the release path, and the telemetry and evidence that show any of it is working — across the model gateway, agent orchestration, and the applications built on top.

The skill that decides whether this role succeeds is translation. You will sit with people whose domains are nothing like yours, understand what they are actually asking for rather than the words they used, and turn it into a technical design they recognise as their requirement. You should be able to hit the ground running on identity, cloud, and controls, and be comfortable that the AI part of the problem is changing faster than anyone’s standards for it.

Controls exist as working platform capability rather than documents. Engineers satisfy them through standard paths, without informal interpretation or repeated meetings.

Risk, Infosec, and Internal Audit recognise their requirements in what you built, and can test control operation from evidence the platform generates rather than assembled after the event.

Every production AI workload has a named owner, risk classification, evaluation record, approved access, operating telemetry, and retrievable release evidence.

Low-risk model and software updates move through a repeatable, time-bound path while higher-risk deployments get the scrutiny they require, and when a control fails the lesson lands in a platform default rather than a report.

Turn the policies, standards, and risk decisions that Risk and Infosec own into reusable controls, policy-as-code, deployment gates, and secure defaults.

Create self-service governance patterns and templates so approved teams can build safely without repeated manual approvals, and embed control checks and evidence capture into repositories, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment workflows.

Establish cost, usage, data-access, and model-access boundaries that are enforced by default through the model gateway and platform services.

Define a proportionate lifecycle for experiments, pilots, production AI products, model changes, and autonomous agents, and set the release requirements that go with each tier.

Design and implement identity, authentication, authorisation, and permission patterns for agents, models, tools, connectors, and service accounts, working with enterprise IAM and AI Security.

Implement least privilege and entitlement models that hold when a request crosses several systems, including through Accio to downstream MCP servers.

Build the approval and human-in-the-loop patterns that high-stakes actions require, while keeping low-risk activity self-service.

Implement an auditable framework for agents and end-user-developed applications, covering named ownership, permissions, approved data, testing, change history, and retirement.

Define and build the event and evidence model needed to reconstruct prompts, model responses, tool calls, agent decisions, approvals, data access, and cost.

Work with AI Engineering and AI Platforms to make telemetry consistent across the model gateway, agent orchestration, applications, and external providers.

Build evaluation and regression hooks into the release path, with acceptance thresholds for models, prompts, agents, and platform changes, automated wherever practical.

Design monitoring for control failures, model drift, anomalous use, permission breaches, and high-risk actions, with clear escalation and remediation paths.

Build the dashboards and evidence packs that service owners, Risk, Infosec, and Internal Audit use directly, so assurance does not depend on you being in the room.

Work with Risk’s AI governance specialist, Infosec, Legal, Compliance, Privacy, Records Management, and TPRM to understand what each needs, and convert it into technical requirements engineers can implement.

Write standards and control requirements that are specific enough to build from, and explain back to non-engineers how the platform behaves and why.

Advise AI Architecture, AI Engineering, AI Platforms, and Forward Deployed Engineering on control design, and help teams classify use cases and understand which controls apply before they build.

Support risk-based onboarding of new foundation models, AI software, and connectors with AI Platforms and AI Security without restarting the process for every low-risk update, and work alongside Percepta so controls and operating knowledge transfer into our ownership.

What to expect when you join our firm

Hybrid working and reasonable accommodations

Generous Holiday policies

Excellent Health and Wellbeing benefits including corporate membership to Wellhub

Paid volunteer time to step away from your desk and into the community

Support to grow through professional development courses, tuition/qualification reimbursement and more

Maternal/paternal leave benefits and family services

All employee events including networking opportunities and social activities

Lunch allowance for use within our subsidized onsite canteen