Head of AI Architecture and Strategy

A leading investment management organization is seeking an experienced Head of AI Architecture & Strategy to lead the architecture of its shared AI technology platform and contribute to its long-term technical direction.

This is a senior, hands-on position combining enterprise AI architecture, platform engineering, and technical leadership. The successful candidate will develop scalable, secure, reusable AI infrastructure supporting research, investment, and internal business teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of shared AI services, including model gateways, inference, agent runtimes, orchestration, and retrieval.
• Guide the engineering of AI platform capabilities, agent frameworks, MCP integrations, APIs, and reusable developer tools.
• Establish architectural standards, design patterns, and implementation guidelines.
• Evaluate AI technologies and contribute to platform strategy and roadmap development.
• Provide hands-on technical architecture, prototyping, engineering reviews, and implementation guidance.
• Ensure production platforms incorporate appropriate security, access controls, observability, evaluation, and reliability.
• Lead and mentor technical engineering teams while promoting adoption of shared platform capabilities.
• Work closely with software engineering, research, investment, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and technology leadership.

Role Requirements

• 10+ years of relevant engineering experience with senior technical leadership responsibilities.
• Deep hands-on architecture experience involving complex enterprise or shared platforms.
• Strong knowledge of LLMs, AI agents, RAG, model serving, and enterprise AI systems.
• Strong Python software development expertise.
• Experience with distributed systems, APIs, Kubernetes, containerization, and cloud or hybrid infrastructure.
• Proven engineering leadership and ownership of production technology platforms.
• Understanding of platform security, access management, reliability, and observability.
• Strong technical judgment, architecture decision-making, and stakeholder communication.
• Bachelor's degree in a related technical discipline or equivalent practical experience.
• Ability to work onsite in Midtown Manhattan four days per week.

Nice to Have

• Investment management, hedge fund, quantitative trading, or financial-services experience.
• Experience building enterprise AI or internal developer platforms.
• Agent frameworks, MCP, AI evaluation, and LLMOps/MLOps experience.
• GPU-backed infrastructure or inference optimization experience.
• Vendor or platform cost management and an advanced technical degree.