Director of Applied AI Engineering

North American Bancard; United States; On-site; USD 207,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, & Vision Coverage

Flexible Paid Time Off

401(k) + Match

Mental Health Support & Well-Being

Paid Maternity & Paternity Leave

Education Assistance

Lifestyle Spending Account

Job summary

North is seeking a Director of Applied AI Engineering to build and lead a hands-on AI team that moves capabilities from prototype to production within regulated financial services workflows. This is a delivery role, focusing on live, auditable systems with strong software engineering fundamentals and explainable guardrails.

The role partners with Product, Risk, Compliance, Legal, and Security to ensure safe governance, KPIs, and rapid value delivery across enterprise projects.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent with 10+ years in software or ML.
• Minimum 2+ years shipping production systems on LLMs, with at least one agentic or conversational live system.
• At least 4+ years of hands-on management experience with hiring and mentoring teams.
• Strong leadership and ability to operate in a fast-paced environment.
• Hands-on debugging of misbehaving agents in production.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead Applied AI engineering team and establish operating model and standards.
• Partner with Product and stakeholders to observe workflows and translate challenges into AI solutions.
• Drive rapid discovery, prototyping, and production transition across enterprise projects.
• Architect, deploy, and maintain production AI solutions including agentic workflows and chatbots.
• Establish modular AI agent integrations with least-privilege access to internal systems.
• Own AI evaluation lifecycle with offline/online evals and production readiness criteria.
• Manage production operations with Cloud/Data engineering, CI/CD, monitoring, and incident response.

Skills

LLM production systems

Agentic/conversational systems

AI SDKs & agent frameworks

People management

Leadership in fast-paced environments

Hands-on debugging of agents in prod

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

10+ years experience in software engineering / machine learning

Tools

LangGraph

CrewAI

AWS Strands Agents

Job description

Job Summary:

The Director of Applied AI Engineering will build and lead North's Applied AI team: a hands-on group that takes AI capabilities from prototype to production inside real business workflows. This is a delivery role, not a research role, measured by systems that are live, adopted, and safe to run in a regulated financial services environment. This will require an individual with strong software engineering fundamentals, judgment about where large language models and machine learning outperform conventional automation, attention to detail, and the capacity to rapidly develop and act upon in-depth knowledge of our business, products, customers, and regulatory obligations. This position will partner with Product, Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Risk to improve current business processes, and will work with Risk, Compliance, Legal, and Information Security to ensure AI systems are explainable, auditable, and safely governed. This role is responsible for providing updates to leadership on the team's impact through clear reporting and KPIs, and for establishing the long-term strategy, technical architecture, and responsible‑AI guardrails as well as the short-term scope and sequencing that gets value into production quickly.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Build and lead a high-performing Applied AI engineering team, defining the practice's operating model, engagement strategy, and technical standards from the ground up.
• Partner with Product, customers, and business stakeholders to observe workflows and turn operational challenges into effective AI solutions.
• Drive rapid discovery, prototyping, and seamless transition of AI capabilities to production across concurrent enterprise projects.
• Architect, deploy, and maintain production AI solutions, including agentic workflows, chatbots, copilots, agent‑assist tools, and traditional ML models.
• Establish modular, reusable integrations for AI agents to securely access internal systems and enterprise data with least‑privilege controls.
• Own the AI evaluation lifecycle, incorporating offline/online evals, benchmark datasets, human‑in‑the‑loop validation, and production readiness criteria.
• Manage production operations alongside Cloud and Data engineering, overseeing CI/CD, monitoring, incident response, latency, and inference cost optimization.

What We Need From You:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent work experience 10+ years of experience in software engineering, machine learning, or a related domain, including time in a customer-facing or business-embedded engineering capacity (ex. forward deployed, solutions, or professional services engineering)
• 2+ years building and shipping production systems on top of large language models (LLMs), including at least one agentic or conversational system live with real users
• 4+ years of hands‑on management experience with a track record of hiring and growing teams as well as providing coaching and mentoring
• Exceptional leadership skills, and proven ability to operate in a fast‑moving environment
• Hands‑on approach to closing gaps in technical execution, able to personally debug a misbehaving agent in production

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities:

• Demonstrated problem-solving and executive‑level communication skills, bridging technical teams and leadership seamlessly.
• Hands‑on expertise in code‑level AI SDKs and agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, CrewAI, AWS Strands Agents), selecting optimal tools rather than relying on no‑code builders.
• Knowledge of core building blocks of production AI applications: tool/function calling, RAG, vector search, structured outputs, conversation and state management, and the judgment to favor deterministic workflows when appropriate.
• Cloud engineering skills (preferably AWS), including deploying agents on managed services (e.g., Bedrock AgentCore), containers, IAM, networking, and cost optimization.
• Track record deploying and maintaining production AI systems, driving robust CI/CD, tracing, incident response, and latency/cost controls.
• Experience making evaluation part of the build cycle, including test sets, regression testing, human review, and measuring quality once systems are live.
• Grasp of AI security and guardrails (prompt injection defense, least‑privilege access, audit trails, and human‑in‑the‑loop design) aligned with financial regulations (Model Risk Management, SOC 2, PCI DSS, GLBA).

What we offer:

• Medical, Dental, & Vision Coverage
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• 401(k) + Match
• Mental Health Support & Well-Being Program
• Paid Maternity & Paternity Leave
• Education Assistance
• Company-funded Lifestyle Spending Account

Salary Range: $207,000-290,000 USD Pay within this range varies by work location and on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. We look forward to discussing your salary expectations and our full total rewards offerings throughout the interview process.

Please note: North is a US-based company and no sponsorship is available for this position at this time.

Who we are:

North, and our family of companies, are committed to helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses. As an end‑to‑end payment solutions company, we provide everything business owners need to get paid, whether they serve customers in a physical storefront, online, or both. We pride ourselves on being large enough to offer customized solutions to our enterprise-level clients while remaining agile enough to take an award‑winning,