Agentic AI Lead - VOIS

About the job

Who we are

VOIS (Vodafone Intelligent Solutions) is a strategic arm of Vodafone Group Plc, creating value for customers by delivering intelligent solutions through Talent, Technology & Transformation.
As the largest shared services organisation in the global telco industry with 30,000 FTE, our portfolio of next-generation solutions and services are designed in partnership with customers across Vodafone Group, local markets, and partner markets to simplify and drive growth. With our strategic partner Accenture, we work alongside our Vodafone customers, other Telco and tech companies to drive transformation, meet the challenges of our industry and ensure we stay relevant and resilient. This partnership is a unique, industry-first model which brings together the best of in-house and 3rd party capability.
We work with customers across 28 countries from 10 VOIS locations: Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India, Romania, Spain, Turkey, UK, Germany, Ireland, and with a network of teams in Czech Republic, Italy, Greece, and Portugal.
#VOIS #BeUnrivalled #CreateTheFuture

About this Role

We are seeking an experienced Agentic AI Lead to drive the design, development and delivery of enterprise-scale agentic AI solutions across Vodafone’s Corporate AI Portfolio. This role will play a key part in shaping the future of AskHR, Vodafone’s AI-powered HR assistant, by defining agent architectures, advancing multi-agent orchestration across Google Cloud and Microsoft Copilot ecosystems, and creating reusable AI patterns for broader corporate functions. The successful candidate will combine deep technical expertise with hands-on engineering leadership, enabling the delivery of secure, scalable and high-quality AI experiences that enhance employee productivity and experience globally.

What you’ll do

Agentic AI Engineering

• Design, develop and deploy production-grade agentic AI solutions, ranging from single-agent implementations to complex multi-agent systems.
• Implement advanced capabilities including tool and function calling, planning, memory management and agent orchestration.
• Apply emerging interoperability standards such as Agent2Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Architecture & Knowledge Management

• Evolve the AskHR AI architecture across Vertex AI Agent Builder, Agent Development Kit (ADK), Agent Engine and Gemini, integrating seamlessly with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Drive improvements in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), grounding quality, chunking strategies, metadata filtering and enterprise knowledge retrieval.
• Lead the transition from structured workflow-driven experiences to conversational, agent-led interactions.

Quality, Security & Operations

• Establish robust evaluation frameworks, including offline evaluations, LLM-as-a-judge methodologies, regression testing and conversation analytics.
• Implement observability frameworks, performance monitoring and cost optimisation strategies.
• Embed responsible AI principles, privacy-by-design practices, GDPR compliance, prompt-injection protection and enterprise security controls.
• Define and implement LLMOps practices and CI/CD processes for prompts, agents and knowledge pipelines.

Technical Leadership

• Mentor and support engineers across multiple squads through code reviews, technical guidance and engineering standards.
• Collaborate with architects, conversation designers, product owners and business stakeholders to align technical strategy with business objectives.
• Lead proof-of-concept initiatives and evaluate emerging agentic AI technologies and industry developments.

Initial Focus Areas

• Define and secure adoption of a target agentic architecture across HR, Google Cloud, Copilot Studio and SAP platforms.
• Accelerate onboarding of HR journeys and knowledge sources through improved ingestion capabilities.
• Deliver scalable content ingestion pipelines that significantly reduce onboarding time for new data sources.
• Introduce evaluation-led release processes that improve answer quality and user containment rates.
• Prototype innovative employee experiences and contribute to the FY28 AI roadmap.

Broader Business Impact

• Develop reusable agentic AI components, accelerators and reference architectures for HR, Finance, Supply Chain, Procurement, Legal and other corporate domains.
• Provide technical leadership across expanding AI portfolios and support the scaling of successful AI solutions throughout the organisation.

Who you are

Essential Skills & Experience

• Significant experience in senior software engineering, machine learning engineering or AI platform development, typically gained over 8+ years.
• Proven hands-on experience delivering production-scale generative AI, LLM and agentic AI solutions.
• Strong programming expertise in Python, with TypeScript experience considered advantageous.
• Deep expertise in either Google Cloud AI technologies (Vertex AI, Agent Builder, ADK, Gemini) or Microsoft AI technologies (Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility, Semantic Kernel, Microsoft Agent Framework), alongside working knowledge of the alternative ecosystem.
• Strong understanding of RAG architectures, vector databases, API design and enterprise integrations.
• Experience with cloud-native development, including containers, serverless platforms, infrastructure as code and CI/CD practices.
• Expertise in AI evaluation methodologies, observability platforms and production AI monitoring.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical teams and supporting the growth of engineering talent.

Desirable Skills & Experience

• Experience delivering AI solutions within HR, Finance, Supply Chain, Procurement or other corporate functions.
• Knowledge of SAP integrations, including SAP SuccessFactors and SAP BTP.
• Experience with ServiceNow or comparable enterprise workflow platforms.
• Exposure to multilingual conversational AI solutions, regulated environments and global deployments.
• Experience with frameworks such as LangGraph or CrewAI.
• Relevant Google Cloud or Microsoft certifications.

What's in it for you

Opportunity to define and influence the future state of enterprise agentic AI architecture across a global organisation.Exposure to cutting-edge technologies spanning Google Cloud AI, Microsoft Copilot, Generative AI and multi-agent systems.Collaboration with global AI, architecture, HR and digital transformation teams.Opportunity to drive innovation through proof-of-concepts, experimentation and emerging technology adoption.Ability to create reusable solutions with impact across multiple business functions and global markets.Continuous learning within a rapidly evolving AI and cloud technology landscape.

What skills you will learn

Advanced multi-agent architecture design and orchestration.Enterprise-scale implementation of Agent2Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP).AI governance, responsible AI frameworks and secure enterprise AI deployment practices.End-to-end LLMOps, AI observability and automated evaluation methodologies.Integration of AI agents across SAP, Copilot Studio, Google Cloud and enterprise platforms.Scalable knowledge management, RAG optimisation and conversational AI design techniques.Strategic technology planning and AI portfolio leadership.

Not a perfect fit?

Concerned you may not meet every requirement? Vodafone is committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive. If you are excited about this role but your experience does not align exactly with every aspect of the job description, you are encouraged to apply. You may be the right candidate for this or another opportunity, and the recruitment team will support you in exploring where your skills fit best.

VOIS Equal Opportunity Employer Commitment