Head of AI Engineering

Head of AI Engineering

Location - New York or Boston

$300,000+

I’m partnering with a well-funded AI-native technology business that’s building a next-generation platform for the financial services sector, and we’re looking for an exceptional Head of AI Engineering to join the founding leadership team.

This is a rare opportunity to define the AI strategy, shape the technical roadmap and build an engineering function from the ground up, while remaining deeply hands-on.

We’re not looking for someone who’s spent the last few years building proofs of concept or managing from a distance. We’re looking for someone who has built production AI systems that are used by real customers and can demonstrate the impact they’ve delivered.

Key skills we’re looking for:

• Proven production experience building LLM applications using OpenAI and/or Anthropic Claude
• Built and deployed RAG systems into production
• Experience with agentic AI frameworks (Agno preferred, LangChain or LlamaIndex also considered)
• Expert-level Python engineering skills
• Experience with Azure (preferred) or
• AWSHands-on experience with vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate or pgvector
• Experience with workflow orchestration
• A daily user of AI coding assistants such as Cursor, Claude Code or GitHub Copilot

We’re particularly interested in candidates who can demonstrate:

• Experience shipping production AI or platform features and clearly articulating the technical challenges, scale and business outcomes
• Experience within financial services, fintech or another regulated environment
• Startup or scale-up experience, ideally within a Series A-C business
• A clear progression from individual contributor to technical leadership while remaining hands-on
• An active GitHub profile, technical portfolio or open-source contributions

This is very much a player-coach role. You’ll lead and grow a high-performing AI engineering team while continuing to architect and build the core AI capabilities that will define the product.

If you’re still passionate about writing production code, enjoy solving complex engineering problems and want to build something genuinely innovative from the ground up, I’d love to have a confidential conversation.

Please note that this opportunity is best suited to candidates with demonstrable experience in production AI engineering. Candidates whose experience is primarily research-based, academic or management-only are unlikely to be the right fit.

If this sounds like you or you’d like to learn more, please get in touch or send me a direct message.

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