Senior Staff AI Engineer

Open Systems Technologies; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Client Technology is seeking a Senior Staff AI Engineer – Agentic AI to operate as a senior individual contributor, shaping how agentic AI systems are designed, built, and operated across the company.

You will work at the intersection of agentic system architecture and hands-on execution, designing core frameworks, writing production code, and guiding teams through complex technical decisions without people management duties.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems and strong experience with LLM systems, agentic workflows or advanced ML infrastructure.
• Proven ownership of complex, cross-cutting agentic systems spanning multiple teams or products.
• Deep experience across backend systems, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
• Fluency with AI-assisted and agentic development workflows.
• Ability to influence technical direction and align teams without formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical direction for agentic AI initiatives, influencing architecture patterns, autonomy boundaries, and system design.
• Design, build, and operate production-grade agentic AI systems used across multiple products.
• Own and evolve shared agentic AI capabilities, including frameworks, orchestration layers, memory strategies, RAG pipelines, and model gateways.
• Lead technical design reviews and help teams navigate tradeoffs involving autonomy, safety, reliability, scalability, and cost.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar for agentic AI development.

Tools

REST APIs

gRPC

tRPC

AWS

GCP

Kubernetes

LangChain

LlamaIndex

Semantic Kernel

CrewAI

PyTorch

Hugging Face

TensorFlow

Pydantic

Zod

Job description

Joining Client Tech means discovering and shaping your contribution to something big. Here, you can work alongside talented tech teams and build a unique career with the Powerful Backing of Client. With a range of opportunities to work with the latest technologies, and a commitment to back the broader engineering community through open source, our mission is to power your success. Because Client Tech is powered by our technology, our culture, and our colleagues.

The Technology organization enables and accelerates the company's growth strategies, delivering global capabilities and services in support of Client's customers and colleagues, while maintaining 24/7 servicing and availability to ensure an uninterrupted, high-quality customer experience. Technology provides the foundation for everything we do in the company while driving differentiation through building and leveraging innovative technology and data insights.

At Client, AI is reshaping the future of commerce and redefining the experiences our commercial customers and card members expect. Within Client Technology, we are building platforms, products, and governance that enable agentic AI systems to operate responsibly and at scale across the enterprise.

Our focus is on agentic AI development: designing intelligent, adaptive systems that can plan, reason, and act across complex workflows with appropriate levels of autonomy. These systems power autonomous workflows, decision support, and customer-facing experiences—while meeting the high standards for security, explainability, reliability, and compliance required in financial services.

We partner closely with product, design, and business teams to deliver agentic capabilities that reduce operational friction, improve decision-making, and transform how customers interact, transact, and grow.

The Role

As a Senior Staff AI Engineer – Agentic AI, you will operate as a senior individual contributor within Client Technology, helping define how agentic AI systems are designed, built, and operated across the company.

You will work at the intersection of agentic system architecture and hands‑on execution: designing core frameworks, writing production code, reviewing critical designs, and guiding teams through complex technical decisions. This role does not include people management; your impact comes from technical leadership, sound judgment, and the ability to turn ambiguity into reliable, scalable agentic systems.

You will work closely with Product and UX partners to shape a shared vision for agentic AI experiences. While product teams own prioritization, Staff engineers are expected to actively influence what gets built and how agentic systems come together across teams.

This is an individual contributor, hands‑on, deeply technical role with broad architectural ownership and high organizational impact; however, as the team grows, you will take on increasing responsibility for technical leadership and people development within the agentic AI space. Mentoring, developing and managing direct reports may be in scope for some of our opportunities.

Responsibilities

What You'll Do

• Drive technical direction for agentic AI initiatives, influencing architecture patterns, autonomy boundaries, and system design.
• Design, build, and operate production‑grade agentic AI systems used across multiple products.
• Own and evolve shared agentic AI capabilities, including:
  • Agent frameworks and orchestration layers
  • Planning, tool use, and memory strategies
  • Retrieval and grounding (RAG) pipelines
  • LLM infrastructure, inference, and model gateways
  • Evaluation, observability, and safety tooling for autonomous systems
• Lead technical design reviews and help teams navigate tradeoffs involving autonomy, safety, reliability, scalability, and cost.
• Partner across teams to deliver complex, cross‑cutting agentic AI initiatives from concept to production.
• Evaluate emerging models, techniques, and agentic patterns and translate them into practical, enterprise‑ready improvements.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar for agentic AI development through example and influence.

Technical Environment

We don't hire to a narrow checklist, but candidates should be comfortable operating in a modern, enterprise‑scale engineering environment with a strong emphasis on agentic AI.

Core engineering stack

• APIs and RPC: REST, gRPC (and in some areas tRPC)
• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS and/or GCP, Kubernetes

Agentic AI and ML

• Integration of commercial and open‑source LLMs into agentic workflows
• Agent and orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or CrewAI, with strong judgment about when to use frameworks versus building lighter‑weight primitives
• Model‑level work using PyTorch and the Hugging Face ecosystem (embeddings, fine‑tuning, inference tooling), with some exposure to TensorFlow
• Strong schema, validation, and state management practices using tools such as Pydantic (Python) and Zod (TypeScript)

Across all systems, we emphasize evaluation, observability, safety, and reliability, reflecting the responsibility of deploying autonomous AI in a regulated, customer‑facing environment.

Qualifications

What We're Looking For

• 12+ years of experience building large‑scale distributed systems + strong experience with LLM systems, agentic workflows or advanced ML infrastructure
• Proven ownership of complex, cross‑cutting agentic systems spanning multiple teams or products.
• Strong engineering fundamentals across backend systems, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
• Deep experience across the agentic AI stack, including planning, tool use, memory, and evaluation.
• Fluency with AI‑assisted and agentic development workflows.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces and translating them into shipped, reliable autonomous systems.
• Ability to influence technical direction and align teams without formal authority.
• Experience in workflow engines, async processing, queues, and streaming systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building agentic systems in fintech or other regulated industries.
• Experience as a founding engineer or early technical leader in AI‑driven products.
• Demonstrated success delivering technically complex autonomous systems that customers actively rely on.
• Meaningful contributions to open‑source AI or agentic frameworks.
• Familiarity with fine‑tuning, model optimization and inference pipelines is a plus