Senior Vice President, AI/ML Software Engineer

Senior Vice President AI/ML Software Engineer

At BNY, we harness cutting‑edge AI technologies to deliver transformative solutions across global financial services. We are looking for a hands‑on technical leader to design and deliver production‑grade AI systems built on agentic frameworks, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), and large‑language‑model orchestration.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Architect multi‑agent AI systems, orchestrating tool‑use patterns, planning/reasoning loops, and autonomous decision chains.
• Design and evolve RAG infrastructure—chunking strategies, embedding pipelines, vector store selection, retrieval ranking, and context window optimization.
• Define vectorization strategy, including embedding model selection and hybrid search (dense + sparse) with re‑ranking approaches.
• Own the AI pipeline orchestration framework—blocks, inlets/outlets, blackboards, memory stores, and content policy enforcement.
• Make build‑vs‑buy decisions across the AI toolchain, establish patterns for prompt engineering at scale, and drive an evaluation‑driven culture with automated regression and measurable quality gates.

Agentic & RAG Systems

• Design multi‑agent architectures with shared memory, blackboard patterns, and inter‑agent communication protocols.
• Build autonomous extraction agents capable of planning, tool selection, self‑correction, and validation.
• Implement knowledge graph construction from unstructured documents—entity extraction, relationship mapping, and graph‑based retrieval.
• Develop evaluation frameworks: retrieval precision/recall, extraction accuracy, agent task completion rates, and hallucination detection.
• Design feedback loops: human‑in‑the‑loop correction, reinforcement from golden‑truth datasets, and continuous prompt refinement.

Team Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 4‑8 engineers (AI/ML, backend, full‑stack).
• Directly manage a VP‑level AI engineer and provide technical guidance and career development.
• Drive architecture reviews, design sessions, and technical decision‑making.
• Own sprint planning, technical backlog, and delivery commitments.
• Foster a culture of rapid experimentation balanced with production rigor.

Hands‑On Engineering

• Implement core agentic components: agent loops, tool registries, memory persistence, and reasoning traces.
• Build embedding pipelines—document preprocessing, chunk boundary detection, metadata enrichment, and vector index management.
• Develop scoring and validation systems (Bayesian confidence, cross‑agent consensus, golden‑truth comparison).
• Contribute to platform services in Java/Spring Boot and AI service layer in Python/FastAPI.
• Build AI‑assisted developer tooling: code‑generation workflows, automated test generation, and intelligent code review.

Delivery & Operations

• Own CI/CD pipelines, containerized deployments, and environment promotion.
• Define observability—agent execution traces, token usage tracking, retrieval quality metrics, and pipeline telemetry.
• Manage schema evolution and data stores (relational + vector).
• Coordinate cross‑team dependencies with platform engineering, data engineering, and infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or advanced degree in computer science, engineering, or related discipline, or equivalent work experience.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 3+ years leading or technically mentoring engineering teams.
• Deep expertise in AI/ML systems: LLM orchestration, prompt engineering, chain‑of‑thought reasoning, RAG architectures, and agentic patterns such as ReAct.
• Experience with vector databases and embedding models (OpenAI embeddings, sentence‑transformers, FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate, or similar).
• Strong Python (3.11+) skills with FastAPI, async/await, Poetry, Pydantic, and pytest.
• Solid Java experience: Java 21, Spring Boot 3.x, and microservice architecture.
• Production AI delivery experience—systems handling real workloads with observability, error recovery, and audit trails.
• Document intelligence: OCR pipelines, NLP, structured extraction from unstructured text.
• Testing & evaluation skills: golden‑truth validation, retrieval metrics (MRR, NDCG), extraction F1 scores, agent success rates.
• Enterprise architecture fundamentals: API design, circuit breakers, caching, event‑driven patterns.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building custom agent frameworks (not just using LangChain/CrewAI).
• Knowledge of graph‑based retrieval—knowledge graphs, graph‑RAG, entity‑relationship extraction.
• Experience with code AI: AI‑assisted development tools, code‑generation pipelines, automated refactoring.
• Familiarity with model fine‑tuning, LoRA/QLoRA, or RLHF techniques.
• Exposure to evaluation‑driven development—automated prompt regression testing, A/B testing of retrieval strategies.
• Angular/TypeScript experience for full‑stack visibility.
• Capital markets or financial services domain knowledge.
• Familiarity with enterprise AI governance: content policies, PII handling, data residency.

Technology Stack

• AI/Agentic: LLM orchestration, multi‑agent systems, ReAct patterns, tool‑use, autonomous pipelines.
• RAG & Vectors: embedding models, vector stores, hybrid search, re‑ranking, chunk optimization.
• LLM: Azure OpenAI, GPT‑4o, enterprise model gateways, prompt versioning.
• Python: Python 3.12/3.13, FastAPI, Poetry, Pydantic, async pipelines.
• Java: Java 21, Spring Boot 3.x, Maven, Resilience4j, Hazelcast.
• Frontend: Angular 19, TypeScript, D3.js, ECharts.
• Database: Oracle, PostgreSQL, vector databases.
• Infrastructure: Docker, GitLab CI/CD, Artifactory.
• Observability: agent traces, token tracking, retrieval quality metrics, audit pipelines.

Benefits

BNY offers competitive compensation, generous paid leave (including paid volunteer time), wellness programs, healthcare coverage, and opportunities for professional growth in a supportive environment.

BNY is an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer—underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, females, individuals with disabilities, and protected veterans are encouraged to apply.