Director of Applied AI Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Build and lead the Applied AI engineering team at North.

• Define the operating model, engagement strategy, and technical standards for the practice.

• Collaborate with Product, customers, and business stakeholders to observe workflows and create AI solutions.

• Drive the discovery, prototyping, and transition of AI capabilities into production across multiple enterprise projects.

• Architect, deploy, and maintain production AI solutions, including agentic workflows, chatbots, copilots, agent-assist tools, and traditional machine learning models.

• Create modular, reusable integrations for AI agents to securely access internal systems and enterprise data with least-privilege controls.

• Oversee the AI evaluation lifecycle, including offline/online evaluations, benchmark datasets, human-in-the-loop validation, and criteria for production readiness.

• Manage production operations alongside Cloud and Data Engineering, supervising CI/CD, monitoring, incident response, latency, and inference-cost optimization.

• Collaborate with Product, Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Risk to enhance business processes.

• Work with Risk, Compliance, Legal, and Information Security to ensure AI systems are explainable, auditable, and governed safely.

• Report the team's impact to leadership through comprehensive reporting and KPIs.

• Develop long-term strategy, technical architecture, responsible AI guardrails, and short-term scope and sequencing.

⛳️ Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

• Over 10 years of experience in software engineering, machine learning, or a related field, including time in customer-facing or embedded engineering roles.

• At least 2 years of experience building and deploying production systems on large language models (LLMs), including at least one agentic or conversational system in use with real users.

• More than 4 years of hands-on management experience, including a proven track record of hiring, developing teams, and providing coaching and mentoring.

• Outstanding leadership skills and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment.

• A hands-on approach to resolving gaps in technical execution, including personally troubleshooting an underperforming agent in production.

• Proven problem-solving abilities and executive-level communication skills.

• Proficiency in code-level AI SDKs and agent frameworks, such as LangGraph, CrewAI, and AWS Strands Agents.

• Familiarity with tool/function calling, RAG, vector search, structured outputs, conversation and state management, and deterministic workflows.

• Cloud engineering expertise, preferably in AWS, including managed services, containers, IAM, networking, and cost optimization.

• Experience in deploying and maintaining production AI systems, CI/CD, tracing, incident response, and managing latency/cost controls.

• Familiarity with AI evaluation processes, including test sets, regression testing, human review, and live quality measurement.

• Knowledge of AI security and guardrails, including defenses against prompt injection, least-privilege access, audit trails, and human-in-the-loop design.

• Understanding of financial regulations, including Model Risk Management, SOC 2, PCI DSS, and GLBA.

• This position does not offer sponsorship.

🏝️ Benefits

• Medical, Dental, & Vision Coverage.

• Flexible Paid Time Off.

• 401(k) with Matching Contributions.

• Mental Health Support & Well-Being Program.

• Paid Maternity & Paternity Leave.

• Education Assistance.

• Company-funded Lifestyle Spending Account.