Vice President, AI/ML Software Engineer (New York)

Vice President AI/ML Software Engineer

At BNY, our culture allows us to run our company better and enables employees’ growth and success. As a leading global financial services company at the heart of the global financial system, we influence nearly 20% of the world’s investible assets. Every day, our teams harness cutting‑edge AI and breakthrough technologies to collaborate with clients, driving transformative solutions that redefine industries and uplift communities worldwide.

We are seeking a Vice President AI/ML Software Engineer to design and implement agentic AI systems, RAG pipelines, and intelligent document processing services. This is a senior individual‑contributor role with high autonomy; you will own significant components of our AI platform, from embedding pipelines and vector retrieval to multi‑agent extraction workflows. You will work closely with the SVP lead to translate architectural vision into production code, while mentoring mid‑level engineers and driving technical excellence across the team. The role is located in New York, NY.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain agentic pipelines, including agent loops, tool registries, memory stores, reasoning traces, and self‑correction mechanisms.
• Build and optimize end‑to‑end RAG systems: document ingestion and preprocessing (OCR, PDFs, structured/unstructured text), chunking strategies, embedding generation, vector index management, hybrid search, metadata filtering, re‑ranking, context assembly, and prompt construction for downstream LLM calls.
• Develop vectorization pipelines, embedding model integration, batch processing, incremental index updates, similarity‑search tuning, and evaluation harnesses for automated accuracy measurement, retrieval quality metrics, regression detection, and A/B comparison tooling.
• Implement multi‑agent coordination patterns such as shared blackboards, inter‑agent messaging, task decomposition, and consensus mechanisms.
• Build FastAPI services exposing AI capabilities as production APIs (extraction, validation, classification) and contribute to Java/Spring Boot platform services where AI integrates with business workflows.
• Design and maintain database schemas for AI metadata, audit trails, pipeline runs, memory entries, and knowledge graphs; enforce content‑policy and data‑governance controls.
• Mentor 2‑3 mid‑level engineers, participate in architecture reviews, and document patterns, decisions, and runbooks for AI system operation.
• Collaborate with product and business stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (advanced degree preferred).
• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years building production AI/ML systems.
• Strong problem‑solving skills and the ability to manage complex data processes.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills for cross‑functional teamwork.
• Proficient in Python 3.11+ with FastAPI, async patterns, Pydantic, Poetry, and pytest; experience with LLM integration, prompt engineering, token management, and streaming.
• Expertise in RAG: embedding models (OpenAI, sentence‑transformers, Cohere, etc.), vector databases (FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, pgvector), chunking, retrieval optimisation, and prompt assembly.
• Experience with agentic AI orchestration (custom frameworks, LangGraph, etc.), tool‑use patterns, function calling, and multi‑turn agent state management.
• Knowledge of NLP/OCR post‑processing, text segmentation, entity extraction, and document parsing.
• Testing rigor: unit tests, integration tests, golden‑truth validation, retrieval‑metric evaluation, and RESTful API design.
• Preferred: knowledge‑graph construction from unstructured text, code‑generation/AI‑assisted refactoring, Java/Spring Boot, Angular/TypeScript, exposure to fine‑tuning or prompt optimisation, and experience with enterprise deployment (Docker, CI/CD).

Technology Stack

• AI/Agentic: Multi‑agent pipelines, tool‑use, autonomous extraction, reasoning loops.
• RAG: Embedding models, vector stores, hybrid search, chunking, re‑ranking.
• LLM: Azure OpenAI, GPT‑4o, structured outputs, function calling.
• Python: 3.12/3.13, FastAPI, Poetry, Pydantic, Gunicorn/Uvicorn.
• Java: 21, Spring Boot 3.x.
• NLP/OCR: Azure Document Intelligence, NLTK, document graph parsing.
• Database: Oracle, PostgreSQL, vector databases.
• Infrastructure: Docker, GitLab CI/CD.
• Testing: Pytest, golden‑truth validation, retrieval metrics, evaluation harnesses.

Benefits and Rewards

• Highly competitive compensation and a pay‑for‑performance philosophy.
• Generous paid leave, including paid volunteer time.
• Flexible global resources and tools to support work‑life balance.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life‑insurance plans.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Other benefits such as holiday, sick leave, and disability coverage as per role.

BNY is an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer—Underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, females, individuals with disabilities, and protected veterans.

This position is at‑will and the company reserves the right to modify base salary and other discretionary payments at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, change in geographic location, team performance, or market factors.