Vice President, AI Engineer

Over the last 20 years, Ares’ success has been driven by our people and our culture. Today, our team is guided by our core values – Collaborative, Responsible, Entrepreneurial, Self-Aware, Trustworthy – and our purpose to be a catalyst for shared prosperity and a better future. Through our recruitment, career development and employee-focused programming, we are committed to fostering a welcoming and inclusive work environment where high-performance talent of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives can build careers within this exciting and growing industry.Job DescriptionSUMMARYAres Management is seeking a highly motivated Vice President, AI Platform Engineering to help design, build, and scale the firm's enterprise AI platform and the production-grade AI capabilities that support use cases across the organization. This is a highly hands-on engineering role within the central Data & AI organization. The VP will design, build, and operate reusable AI platform services and work closely with AI Engineering, Data Engineering, Product Management, Cybersecurity, and business teams to bring AI solutions from concept through production.The successful candidate will combine strong software engineering fundamentals with practical experience building Generative AI and machine learning systems. They will own significant platform components and technical workstreams, contribute to architecture and engineering standards, and help enable development teams across the firm to build secure, scalable, reliable, and governed AI applications.REPORTING RELATIONSHIPSReports to: Managing Director, Head of Data Engineering & AI Platforms PRIMARY FUNCTIONS & ESSENTIAL RESPONSIBILITIES:AI Platform Engineering· Design, build, and operate production-grade services supporting Ares' enterprise Generative AI platform.· Own major platform components and technical workstreams from design through implementation, deployment, and ongoing operation.· Develop reusable APIs, SDKs, services, and developer tooling that enable teams across the firm to build AI applications efficiently.· Contribute to platform architecture, technical standards, design patterns, and engineering best practices.· Partner with senior AI engineering and architecture leaders on technical design decisions and platform evolution.Write high-quality production code and participate actively in design reviews, code reviews, testing, and troubleshooting.Core AI Platform Capabilities· Build and enhance multi-LLM gateway capabilities supporting multiple model providers, including routing, rate limiting, resiliency, usage tracking, and cost management.· Develop Retrieval-Augmented Generation services, including embeddings, semantic and hybrid search, vector database integrations, document processing, and structured retrieval.· Build reusable orchestration services supporting agentic, multi-agent, and multi-step AI workflows.· Develop and maintain prompt management, model registry, model lifecycle, and evaluation capabilities.· Implement integrations using Model Context Protocol (MCP), agent tool-use patterns, and other emerging AI interoperability standards.· Develop observability and AI FinOps capabilities to monitor quality, latency, token consumption, utilization, and cost.· Integrate AI platform services with enterprise data products, applications, APIs, and other internal systems.AI Application Enablement· Partner with AI Product Management, Data Engineering, and business teams to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.· Enable secure connectivity between AI applications, enterprise systems, and governed data sources.· Develop reusable patterns and platform services that accelerate delivery of AI use cases across investment and corporate functions.· Support vertical engineering teams adopting shared platform capabilities and provide technical guidance on implementation.· Create reference implementations, documentation, technical design artifacts, and development standards to promote consistent adoption.DevOps, Reliability & Observability· Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for AI applications and platform services· Implement monitoring, telemetry, performance measurement, and operational health dashboards· Establish deployment processes, testing frameworks, and production support models· Contribute to disaster recovery and high-availability strategies for platform componentsSecurity, Risk & Governance· Partner closely with Information Security, Legal, Compliance, Risk, and architecture teams to implement appropriate controls across AI services.· Implement authentication, authorization, entitlement, and access-control capabilities for AI applications and platform services.· Develop encryption, secrets management, audit logging, and monitoring standards.· Support model governance, data protection, information barriers, and AI risk-management requirements.· Help ensure AI solutions meet the firm's cybersecurity, regulatory, compliance, and governance standards.· Contribute technical documentation and evidence required for architecture and governance reviews.Leadership & Collaboration· Lead complex technical initiatives and workstreams from architecture and design through production deployment.· Provide technical guidance, code review, and mentorship to AI engineers and other developers.· Collaborate with senior engineers and technology leaders on platform architecture and engineering strategy.· Evaluate emerging AI models, frameworks, development tools, and platform technologies, and make recommendations based on practical experimentation.· Help establish a strong engineering culture focused on software quality, simplicity, scalability, and operational excellenceQUALIFICATIONS:Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical disciplineExperience Required:8+ years of professional software engineering, data engineering, machine learning engineering, or related experience.2+ years of hands-on experience building Generative AI, LLM, machine learning, or AI platform solutions in production.Strong Python engineering skills and demonstrated experience writing production-quality software.Experience designing and developing APIs, microservices, distributed systems, and cloud-native applications.Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform, preferably Azure.Experience with containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and modern DevOps practices.Practical experience building LLM applications using techniques such as RAG, embeddings, vector search, prompt engineering, tool use, or agentic workflows.Familiarity with model evaluation, testing, observability, and production monitoring for AI systems.Understanding of software security, authentication and authorization, secrets management, and secure development practices.Experience delivering highly scalable, reliable production systems.Demonstrated ability to independently own complex engineering initiatives from design through production.Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, data, security, and business teams.Preferred Qualifications:Experience with Databricks, including capabilities such as Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Model Serving, MLflow, or Vector Search.Experience with Azure OpenAI, Azure AI services, or other enterprise LLM providers.Experience with LLM and agent frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, or comparable technologies.Experience implementing multi-LLM gateway, model-routing, or AI proxy patterns.Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or other agent tool-use and interoperability frameworks.Experience building evaluation frameworks for retrieval and generation quality, including automated evaluation or LLM-as-judge approaches.Experience with LLM observability, tracing, model governance, and AI FinOps.Experience building internal developer platforms, reusable engineering frameworks, or self-service capabilities.Financial services, asset management, private equity, investment banking, or alternative investments experience.Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.Reporting RelationshipsManaging Director, Head of Data Engineering & AI PlatformsCompensationThe anticipated base salary range for this position is listed below. Total compensation may also include a discretionary performance-based bonus. Note, the range takes into account a broad spectrum of qualifications, including, but not limited to, years of relevant work experience, education, and other relevant qualifications specific to the role.$250,000 - $270,000The firm also offers robust Benefits offerings. Ares U.S. Core Benefits include Comprehensive Medical/Rx, Dental and Vision plans; 401(k) program with company match; Flexible Savings Accounts (FSA); Healthcare Savings Accounts (HSA) with company contribution; Basic and Voluntary Life Insurance; Long-Term Disability (LTD) and Short-Term Disability (STD) insurance; Employee Assistance Program (EAP), and Commuter Benefits plan for parking and transit.Ares offers a number of additional benefits including access to a world-class medical advisory team, a mental health app that includes coaching, therapy and psychiatry, a mindfulness and wellbeing app, financial wellness benefit that includes access to a financial advisor, new parent leave, reproductive and adoption assistance, emergency backup care, matching gift program, education sponsorship program, and much more.There is no set deadline to apply for this job opportunity. Applications will be accepted on an ongoing basis until the search is no longer active.SummaryLocation: New York, NYType: Full time