Senior Forward Deployed AI Engineer - Vice President

Description

The team is a group of engineers who turn advanced AI capabilities into production systems, working alongside business and technology teams from first idea to live release.

The work goes beyond chat tools: you build systems that reason, plan and carry out multi-step tasks, owning the engineering from agent design and orchestration through enterprise integration, security and monitoring.

The group values hands-on coding, teamwork and quick delivery. You will solve hard technical problems, shape architecture choices, and help create reusable tools and engineering standards used across the company.

This senior role is an embedded, hands-on engineer within Line of Business squads, building production-grade agent reasoning logic, custom tool integrations, data retrieval pipelines and resilient execution workflows that meet enterprise safety, security and quality standards.

Responsibilities

• Write clean, modular production Python for agent reasoning loops, dynamic tool calls, short- and long-term memory, and delegation to sub-agents.
• Build and maintain custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and API connectors that link agents to enterprise systems such as ticketing tools, relational and NoSQL databases, message queues and internal REST or gRPC microservices.
• Develop and tune retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) components covering document parsing, embeddings, vector indexes, metadata filters and semantic search.
• Add resilience through retries with exponential backoff, circuit breakers, fallback routines, and human-in-the-loop escalation when model output is ambiguous.
• Use Pydantic and JSON Schema to build deterministic validation that keeps non-deterministic model output structured and type-safe.
• Plug real-time guardrails into agent loops for prompt injection defense, jailbreak mitigation and automated PII filtering or redaction.
• Work with C12 engineers to build regression testbeds, curate golden datasets and add automated evaluations to CI/CD release pipelines.
• Take part in sprints, problem-solving sessions and peer code reviews, and coach junior engineers on craftsmanship.
• Sit with line of business users such as traders, bankers and analysts to watch daily workflows and learn domain logic and edge cases.
• Build and refine working agent prototypes and prompt chains based on daily feedback from business pilot users.
• Review user logs and feedback to find model failures, unclear prompts and UI friction, then improve agent reasoning.
• Assess risk in business decisions with care for the firm's reputation and for clients and assets, follow laws, rules and policy, and report control issues openly.

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4+ years of strong Python, Java or Go.
• 2+ years working hands-on with foundation model APIs, such as enterprise AI gateways, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex AI or Anthropic, and putting LLMs into backend services.
• Solid REST or gRPC API work, plus Docker, Git, Linux and CI/CD pipelines.
• Proven understanding of advanced prompt engineering, structured output parsing, vector databases and retrieval strategies.
• Experience working with business stakeholders, product managers or operations users in fast, iterative delivery cycles.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• Master's degree preferred.

Conditions

Full-time role based in New York, New York, United States, with a salary range of $142,320.00 to $213,480.00.

Automated processing and AI help match your skills to openings, and with your consent to other suitable roles, but people conduct, check and make all hiring decisions with no autonomous decision-making.

Illinois residents can review the AI notice and rights that apply to them.

The company is an equal opportunity employer, and its EEO policy statement and Know Your Rights poster are available.

Benefits

• Discretionary and formulaic incentive and retention awards may be offered to eligible employees in addition to salary.
• Medical, dental and vision coverage.
• 401(k) plan.
• Insurance covering life, accident and disability.
• Wellness programs.
• Paid vacation, sick leave and paid holidays.
• Offerings vary by jurisdiction, job level and date of hire.