Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) - Director

Description

The company's Applied AI and Agents Factory is a team of engineers who turn advanced AI into production systems. You will work with business and technology teams on hard engineering problems, build intelligent agents, and move ideas from first concept to live use.

The work goes past chat tools. You will build systems that reason, plan and carry out multi-step workflows, and you will own the whole lifecycle, from agent design and orchestration to enterprise integration, security and monitoring.

The Factory values hands-on building, teamwork and fast delivery. You will solve difficult technical problems, shape architecture decisions, and help create reusable tools and engineering standards used across the company.

This is a senior management role in the Technology Applications Development job family, based in New York. The Forward Deployed Engineering Director leads a high-performing engineering squad embedded in the company's Lines of Business. You will be the main delivery executive working with Managing Directors and CIOs to turn complex business problems into production-grade AI agents, while enforcing architecture standards, evaluation gates and engineering quality.

Responsibilities

• Act as the main delivery partner for Line of Business Managing Directors, CIOs and business product heads in the NYC and London hubs.
• Lead sprint planning, staffing, technical architecture and fast delivery across 3-5 AI agent projects running at the same time in the pod.
• Make sure all agent software from the pod follows enterprise architecture blueprints, the company's evaluation gates and Lakera Guardrails.
• Lead, mentor and coach a squad of 8 senior Forward Deployed Engineers at AVP to SVP level, building a culture of technical rigor, customer empathy and rapid prototyping.
• Lead the design and build of integrations between autonomous agents and core banking back ends, databases and third-party APIs.
• Work with the Principal AI Architect Director and the Senior Vice President of TPM to improve factory delivery playbooks and send structured feedback to platform teams.
• Assess risk when making business decisions, protecting the firm's reputation, clients and assets. Drive compliance with laws, rules, regulations and internal policy, use sound ethical judgment, escalate and report control issues openly, and hold people accountable when they fall short of these standards.

Requirements

• 15+ years of relevant technology experience, including 8+ years leading engineering teams at Tier-1 banks, leading tech firms or fintechs.
• Hands-on understanding of modern AI, including large language models, autonomous agents, embeddings, vector search and Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• A record of managing demanding client relationships and delivering complex distributed systems into regulated production environments.
• Ability to attract, hire, develop and keep top senior engineers.
• Solid working knowledge of financial products, capital markets, wealth management or enterprise banking operations.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• Master's degree preferred.

Conditions

Full-time position based in New York, New York, United States, with a base salary of $170,000.00 to $300,000.00.

Eligible employees may receive discretionary and formulaic incentive and retention awards in addition to salary.

Hiring decisions are made and checked by people, not by automated decision-making.

Benefits

• Medical, dental and vision coverage, a 401(k), life, accident and disability insurance, and wellness programs.
• Paid vacation, sick leave and paid holidays.
• Benefit offerings may vary by jurisdiction, job level and hire date.