Remote AI Platform Director, Data Engineering & MLOps

First Citizens Bank; Phoenix (AZ); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

First Citizens Bank seeks a Director to lead the AI platform engineering and enablement within our Cloud Data and AI Platform organization. You will own the end-to-end AI lifecycle—from data and model development to MLOps, deployment, governance, and responsible AI compliance in a regulated financial environment.

You will partner with risk, legal, and governance teams to implement scalable, audit-ready AI infrastructure, ensure explainability, and drive GenAI initiatives across business units in

Qualifications

• Deep hands-on experience building production ML systems on AWS.
• 2+ years in AI/ML, data science, or data engineering leadership roles.
• Strong knowledge of: machine learning (XGBoost, deep learning, NLP, time series); MLOps practices (CI/CD, model monitoring, drift detection); distributed systems and cloud architecture.
• Strong programming background in Python + SQL (Scala/Java a plus).
• Experience working in regulated environments with model governance.

Responsibilities

• Architect and lead AI/ML workloads on AWS including SageMaker, Bedrock, Lambda/ECS/EKS; data pipelines with S3/Glue/Snowflake.
• Define enterprise standards for MLOps, feature stores, and model lifecycle management.
• Build and maintain integrations with enterprise platforms for data ingestion, metadata management, tokenization, and control evidence generation.
• Enhance automation, resilience, and observability with end-to-end telemetry for model/data pipelines.
• Collaborate with Risk, Legal, Compliance, and Model Risk to embed Responsible AI principles and audit-ready control evidence.

Skills

AWS ML platform

Python

SQL

MLOps

Distributed systems

Regulated environments

Education

Bachelor's degree in IT or related field

High School Diploma with 12 years of IT experience

Tools

SageMaker

Bedrock

Lambda

ECS

EKS

Snowflake

Databricks

Job description

First Citizens Bank seeks a Director to lead the AI platform engineering and enablement within our Cloud Data and AI Platform organization. You will own the end-to-end AI lifecycle—from data and model development to MLOps, deployment, governance, and responsible AI compliance in a regulated financial environment.

You will partner with risk, legal, and governance teams to implement scalable, audit-ready AI infrastructure, ensure explainability, and drive GenAI initiatives across business units in