Tech Lead, AI Conversational Agents

Job description

Country: Spain

START HERE

Santander (www.santander.com) is evolving from a high-impact global brand into a technology-driven organization, and our people are at the center of this journey. Together, we are driving a customer-focused transformation that values bold thinking, innovation, and the courage to challenge what is possible. This is more than a strategic change. It is an opportunity for motivated professionals to grow, learn, and make a real difference. Our mission is to help more people and businesses prosper. We have a strong risk culture and expect all our professionals at every level to take a proactive and responsible approach to risk management.

THE DIFFERENCE YOU MAKE

Santander Spain is looking for a Tech Lead, AI Conversational Agents for its Data & AI area, based in Madrid (Luca de Tena building). We are shaping how we work through innovation, cutting-edge technology, collaboration, and the freedom to explore new ideas. To succeed in this role, you will:

• Lead the technical implementation and evolution of production conversational agents (chat/voice) in line with architecture, security, and quality standards.
• Guide engineers and squads by defining design patterns, cookbooks, and engineering best practices.
• Manage technical debt for products in your scope, advise Product Owners, and actively influence its resolution.
• Work closely with architects and provide key input into the evolution, improvement, and productization of technical architecture components.
• Define and oversee standards, rules, guidelines, reference architectures, and cookbooks to reduce the cognitive load on engineering teams.
• Industrialize the use of AI agents through common harnessing capabilities, ensuring scalability, resilience, observability, and safe operation in enterprise environments.
• Configure and optimize intents, entities, slots, context, flows, disambiguation, fallback, and handoff to a human agent.
• Prepare and maintain conversational datasets: cleaning, labeling, versioning, and quality control.
• Define and perform technical evaluation: intent precision/recall, confusion, coverage, and LLM evaluation (rubrics, human evaluation, safety checks).
• Integrate agents with internal systems through MCPs, APIs, or enterprise knowledge bases.
• Implement security and compliance controls: PII redaction, access control, logging/auditing, retention, and internal policies.

WHAT YOU WILL BRING

Our people are our greatest strength. Each person contributes unique perspectives that make us stronger as a team and organization. We empower our teams by valuing who they are and building on what they bring. The following requirements represent the essential knowledge, skills, and abilities for success in this role. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable people with disabilities to perform essential functions.

Professional experience

At least 5 years of software development experience and participation in technology projects in production environments, including design, implementation, integration, maintenance, and evolution of business-oriented solutions. Experience leading technology solutions, guiding engineering teams, and using Agile methods. Extensive, essential experience with Python. Experience in applied AI, NLP, software engineering, data, or automation in production environments. Hands-on experience building and maintaining production chatbots/voicebots (web/app/WhatsApp/IVR). Experience applying LLMs to real use cases: prompting, RAG/semantic search, quality evaluation, guardrails, and hallucination mitigation. Experience in analytics and monitoring: event instrumentation, logs, dashboards, and metrics. Experience integrating with MCPs, REST APIs/webhooks, and corporate systems. Experience with at least one conversational platform: Dialogflow, Azure Bot Framework, Amazon Lex, IBM Watson Assistant, Genesys, LivePerson, Kore.ai, or Cognigy (preferred). Knowledge of MLOps/LLMOps practices (preferred): versioning, deployments, monitoring, and rollback. Experience in regulated environments or sensitivity to security and privacy (PII, GDPR) is preferred.

Education

Degree in Computer Engineering/Telecommunications, Mathematics/Statistics, Data Science, Physics, or a related field. Master's/postgraduate qualification in AI, Data Science, NLP, or Software Engineering is preferred.

Preferred certifications: Cloud Fundamentals (AWS/Azure/GCP); NLP/Conversational AI (any recognized vendor); Scrum/Agile (PSM/CSM); Responsible AI/Security (valued).

Languages

Spanish: native or equivalent (required). English: C1 (technical documentation, supplier meetings, international coordination) preferred.

Hard skills

NLP: intent classification, entity extraction, slot filling, rule-based and ML-based dialogue. LLM: prompting, RAG, embeddings, response evaluation, guardrails, safety filters. Programming: Python and/or JavaScript/TypeScript (valued), Git, basic testing. Integration: MCPs, REST APIs, OAuth/SSO concepts, webhooks, Postman. Data: basic/intermediate SQL, data preparation, labeling, versioning. Knowledge management: knowledge bases, taxonomies, content versioning, semantic search. Quality: conversational test cases, regression, UAT, edge-case validation. Tools: Jira/Confluence, CI/CD (preferred).

Soft skills

Analytical thinking and problem-solving (root-cause-oriented debugging); technical leadership; clear communication with technical and business stakeholders and well-organized documentation; focus on quality and customer experience and attention to detail; autonomy and ownership, with the ability to influence backlog prioritization; teamwork and cross-functional collaboration (AI, IT, CX, operations, compliance); adaptability and fast learning in emerging technologies.

WE VALUE YOUR IMPACT

Your contribution matters, and we recognize it. You can expect a fair and competitive rewards package that reflects the impact you create and the value you deliver. We know rewards go beyond numbers. We help our teams go further through global opportunities and broad career paths. Enjoy hybrid work, with some days remote and others in the office with your team, plus flexible hours. Access hundreds of courses on our platforms, including exclusive access to Santander Open Academy (www.santanderopenacademy.com). Receive a competitive salary and performance-based bonuses. Benefit from preferred banking conditions, special loan rates, life insurance, and more. Through BeHealthy, our global wellness program, we support holistic well-being. We offer childcare support and family programs for every stage of life. Santander Contigo provides employees and their families with legal, emotional, and administrative support. Additional benefits include a gym/WellHub membership, medical centers at some of our sites, meal subsidies, parking, shuttle service from several locations in Madrid, and exclusive Santander employee discounts and offers. And this is only the beginning—we will tell you more when you join! We are here to keep you motivated, help you achieve your goals, and celebrate your progress at every step.

LOCAL COMPLIANCE

Santander is proud to be an equal opportunity organization regardless of age, gender, disability, marital status, race, religion, or sexual orientation. We are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible application process for all candidates.

WHAT'S NEXT?

If this sounds like a role that interests you, apply. Ready to take the next step in your journey? #LI-FB1