GenAI Platform Engineering Team Lead

The GenAI Platform Engineering Team Lead is the hands-on engineering leader of the team that builds and operates M&T’s enterprise GenAI platform: the governed AI gateway, model integrations, retrieval services, and environments through which the bank’s AI workloads run. Leading a team of platform engineers (SE II/SE III) and buildout contractors, this player-coach role owns delivery of the platform roadmap, technical quality, and production operation — while remaining an individual contributor on the hardest problems.

The role reports to the GenAI Services Director and partners daily with the GenAI Enablement team (governance, standards, intake, solution architecture) so that what the platform enforces matches what governance requires, with evidence produced natively

Responsibilities

Delivery & Technical Leadership

Own delivery of the platform roadmap: gateway hardening and enforcement, model provider integrations, retrieval services, environment tiers, and observability hooks.

Remain hands-on: design authority on platform architecture, code and design review, and direct contribution on critical-path components.

Direct and review contractor buildout work; enforce documentation, testing, and capability-transfer discipline so knowledge lands in the team.

Own production operation under the bank’s controlled-change and separation-of-duties model, including the AI production support rotation and incident management.

Team Leadership & Partnership

Lead, coach, and develop the platform engineering team (SE II/SE III); set the technical bar and grow engineers into track ownership.

Manage priorities across platform buildout, use-case support, and vendor-delivered workstreams; re-sequence transparently when approval paths or dependencies stall.

Partner with the Enablement team lead so governance standards, intake decisions, and platform enforcement operate as one system.

Represent platform status, risks, and trade-offs to the Director and governance forums with evidence, not assertions

Skills

Must have

Supervisory / Managerial Responsibilities

Direct supervisory responsibility for the GenAI Platform Engineering team (FTE engineers and assigned contractors): hiring, coaching, performance, and work direction.

Required Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree and a minimum of 7 years’ technology experience including hands-on platform, cloud, or application engineering, with prior team leadership or technical lead experience; in lieu of a degree, a combined minimum of 11 years’ education and/or relevant experience.

Hands-on Azure platform depth: API Management, Entra ID, Key Vault, Azure AI services including Azure AI Foundry, monitoring, and IaC (Terraform/Bicep) — with the judgment to keep the platform venue-agnostic as additional model providers and tools onboard.

Hands-on GenAI experience: model integration, RAG patterns, and AI-assisted engineering workflows.

Experience operating production platforms in a regulated, controlled-change environment.

Demonstrated ability to lead while contributing — a working manager, not an administrator

Nice to have

Financial services or other highly regulated industry experience; audit-evidence familiarity.

Experience directing vendor/contractor delivery and enforcing capability transfer.

Experience building a platform team from early stage

Other

Languages

English: C1 Advanced

Seniority

Lead