Technical Lead - Agentic

About WPP Production

We are WPP Production - the unified global production company that brings together all of WPP's content producers, studios and craft experts into one connected organisation. We combine world-class human craft with next generation technology to originate, design, and deliver multi-channel content systems at scale. Built for borderless collaboration and powered by deep craft expertise, we are the production engine designed for today's always on, AI driven marketing world.

About WPP

WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world's leading brands. We unite cutting-edge media intelligence and data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production, transformative enterprise solutions and expert strategic counsel in a single company – powered by exceptional talent and our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, to help our clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth. For more information, visit WPP.com.

ROLE

Senior technical expert responsible for architectural decisions, technical direction, and mentoring devel opment teams in building robust agentic AI systems with autonomous decision-making capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and own the technical architecture for agentic applications (single- and multi-agent), including orchestration patterns, tool/function calling, memory, planning approaches, and human-in-the-loop control points where required.
• Lead technical decision-making and code reviews, embedding WPP Production engineering standards for maintainability, performance, security, and reliability across the agentic stack
• Lead and mentor a junior team to deliver at pace: provide clear task breakdown, pairing, feedback, and technical coaching, with a focus on repeatable delivery patterns.
• Translate product goals into executable technical plans, working with PMO and BA to: shape epics/stories, define acceptance criteria, and align delivery milestones with Product, Design, and QA.
• Own end-to-end SDLC for agentic apps: embedding WPP Production engineering standards for development workflow, branching strategy, CI/CD, release management, and production support/incident response expectations.
• Implement and enforce best practices for building frontier models (e.g., GPT, Gemini) without training/creating models: model selection, prompt strategy, tool design, context management, and provider abstraction to reduce lock-in.
• Establish rigorous testing and evaluation for non-deterministic systems, including unit/integration tests, prompt/agent regression testing, offline evaluation harnesses, golden datasets, and automated quality gates in CI.
• Work with Engineering leadership to design and implement safety and security controls for agentic apps, including data handling, redaction strategies, secrets management, access control, prompt injection defenses, and secure tool execution patterns.
• Ensure observability for agentic systems: structured logs, traces, metrics, conversation/agent run replay, token/cost monitoring, and dashboards tied to SLAs/SLOs.
• Own performance and cost optimisation across the stack (latency, throughput, caching, batching, model routing/fallbacks, context size management, vector retrieval efficiency).
• Lead integration with enterprise systems and APIs (internal services, identity, permissions, knowledge sources), ensuring robust error handling and fault tolerance.
• Identify and mitigate technical and delivery risks early, communicate trade-offs clearly, and propose pragmatic paths to ship safely.
• Define and maintain reference architectures, reusable components, and templates (agent framework scaffolds, evaluation harnesses, integration patterns) to enable scaling delivery across projects/teams.
• Stay current with the rapidly evolving agent ecosystem (frameworks, providers, evaluation approaches) and make recommendations on adoption that balance innovation with stability.
  
  

Requirements

• Proven experience as a Technical Lead / Senior Engineer leading delivery of production software, including mentoring engineers, running code reviews, and driving technical direction.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and SDLC ownership: Agile delivery, estimation, backlog shaping, release management, and operational accountability.
• Demonstrable experience building and shipping applications using LLM platforms (e.g., GPT class models, Gemini-class models) via APIs/managed services—focused on application development, not model training.
• Experience with agentic patterns and frameworks (for example orchestration graphs, tool calling, multi-step planning, retrieval, memory), and ability to choose patterns appropriate to risk and reliability needs.
• Ability to design systems that are robust to probabilistic/non-deterministic behaviour: evaluation strategy, regression testing, monitoring, and fail-safe design.
• Strong knowledge of security and privacy in modern cloud applications (authn/authz, secrets, least privilege, secure integration patterns) and how those concerns change when LLMs and tools are introduced.
• Excellent communication skills: able to align stakeholders, explain trade-offs, and provide clear technical direction to a mixed-experience team.
  
  

Technical Skills

• Strong programming capability in at least one backend language used for AI applications (e.g., Python, TypeScript/Node, Go, Java, or similar).
• Experience with multi-agent frameworks and orchestration tooling (e.g., ADK, LangGraph/LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI or equivalents), including designing reusable agent templates.
• Experience building APIs and service integrations (REST/GraphQL), including robust error handling, retries, and idempotency patterns.
• Practical experience with cloud platforms and managed AI services (e.g., Azure AI Services, AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex AI) and deploying production workloads. Familiarity with containerisation and delivery pipelines (Docker, Kubernetes and/or managed container platforms, CI/CD).
• Knowledge of data and retrieval patterns commonly used with LLM applications (vector search, embeddings, chunking strategies, retrieval evaluation), and working with at least one vector database.
  
  

Why work here:

At WPP Production, you'll help shape the future of content production at a truly global scale. We bring together world-class talent, cutting-edge studios, and advanced technology to solve some of the most complex creative and production challenges in the industry. You'll work in a collaborative, borderless environment where craft excellence is valued, innovation is encouraged, and AI and next-generation tools are used to amplify not replace human creativity. With access to diverse projects, global career opportunities, and the backing of WPP's unmatched network, this is a place where you can grow your skills, make real impact, and create work that performs for every audience, across every channel, at every moment.

Inclusion and Impact

WPP is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to particular characteristics. We are committed to fostering a culture of respect in which everyone feels they belong and has the same opportunities to progress in their careers.

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