Director, AI Engineering & Strategy

New-York-Life; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 148,000 - 211,000; Full time

Job summary

New York Life in New York City, NY, is seeking a Director, AI Engineering to drive the company’s AI transformation. This hands-on, full-stack AI role designs, builds, and delivers AI solutions end to end, spanning traditional ML, Generative AI, and agentic AI, while shaping technical strategy and mentoring a growing team.

You will partner with business stakeholders, data scientists, engineers, and product and technology partners to deploy on the enterprise AI platform, establish responsible AI

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in a quantitative field (MS/PhD).
• 8+ years applying data science, ML and AI to business problems.
• Experience with AI-assisted engineering tools and agents.
• Full-stack AI fluency from modeling to production.
• Strong Python skills; SQL/JavaScript knowledge for front-end work.
• Hands-on with LLMs, RAG architectures and graph retrieval.
• Experience in multi-agent and sub-agent orchestration.
• Cloud platforms experience (GCP Vertex AI, AWS SageMaker/Bedrock) and Databricks.
• Strong stakeholder engagement and mentoring track record.
• Experience in life insurance/financial services is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead AI/ML and GenAI initiatives end-to-end with cross-functional teams.
• Own end-to-end delivery for AI solutions on the enterprise AI platform.
• Design and implement agentic AI systems with multi-agent orchestration.
• Design and deploy production-grade RAG and retrieval systems.
• Lead technical decisions across the AI stack and integration protocols.
• Prototype AI-powered apps using Streamlit, React, or similar.
• Build with AI-assisted engineering tools daily; review generated output.
• Define and evolve technical standards for AI development and responsible AI.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to data scientists and engineers.
• Travel <10% to events and vendor meetings.

Skills

Full-stack AI fluency

Python

SQL

JavaScript/TypeScript

CI/CD

Docker

Kubernetes

LLMs

GraphRAG

Multi-agent

Mentoring

Stakeholder engagement

Education

MS or PhD in CS/AI

Tools

Databricks

Vertex AI

SageMaker

Bedrock

LangGraph

MCP

Databricks CI/CD templates

Job description

New York Life in New York City, NY, is seeking a Director, AI Engineering to drive the company’s AI transformation. This hands-on, full-stack AI role designs, builds, and delivers AI solutions end to end, spanning traditional ML, Generative AI, and agentic AI, while shaping technical strategy and mentoring a growing team.

You will partner with business stakeholders, data scientists, engineers, and product and technology partners to deploy on the enterprise AI platform, establish responsible AI