Director of AI Engineering

Director of AI Engineering

Location: New York, NY; Hybrid (Candidates MUST be local - No relocation)

Compensation: $200-250K + bonus

US Citizens/GC Holders Only; No Visa Sponsorship

Responsibilities

• Drive architecture, safety boundaries, and technical direction for production-grade agentic AI systems and enterprise-wide capabilities
• Own agent frameworks, orchestration (LangGraph, CrewAI), RAG pipelines, model gateways, and evaluation/observability tooling for autonomous systems
• Evaluate emerging AI techniques, lead complex cross-cutting initiatives, and balance tradeoffs among safety, reliability, scale, and cost
• Lead, recruit, and mentor senior engineers; handle HR processes (performance reviews, talent development); and foster a culture of technical excellence

Technology

• Stack: Python, Go, TypeScript | REST, gRPC | AWS/GCP, Kubernetes, Kafka, Airflow
• Agentic AI & ML: LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, PyTorch, Hugging Face (fine-tuning, embeddings, inference), Pydantic, Zod

Qualifications

Required

• 10+ years engineering large-scale distributed backend systems, with deep experience in LLMs, agentic workflows, and ML infrastructure
• Track record leading/growing teams, mentoring senior talent, managing full SDLCs, and influencing across cross-functional boundaries
• Advanced knowledge of planning, tool use, memory, streaming/async architectures, and AI-assisted development tools
• Ability to drive clarity in ambiguous spaces and ship production-grade autonomous systems.

Preferred

• Experience in fintech or regulated industries; background as an early technical leader/founding engineer in AI
• Track record of building widely used autonomous systems or contributing to open-source AI frameworks
• Hands-on experience with model fine-tuning, inference optimization, and modern application stacks (React, Mobile, CI/CD)