Director of Applied AI Engineering

North

. Build and lead North's Applied AI engineering team .

Posted 10/15/2026full-timeRemote • United StatesLead💰 $207,000 - $290,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloud

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Build and lead North's Applied AI engineering team
Define the practice's operating model, engagement strategy, and technical standards
Partner with Product, customers, and business stakeholders to observe workflows and develop AI solutions
Drive discovery, prototyping, and 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, including offline/online evaluations, benchmark datasets, human-in-the-loop validation, and production-readiness criteria
Manage production operations with Cloud and Data Engineering, overseeing CI/CD, monitoring, incident response, latency, and inference-cost optimization
Partner with Product, Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Risk to improve business processes
Work with Risk, Compliance, Legal, and Information Security to ensure AI systems are explainable, auditable, and safely governed
Report the team's impact to leadership through clear reporting and KPIs
Establish long-term strategy, technical architecture, responsible-AI guardrails, and short-term scope and sequencing

Requirements

What you’ll need

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
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 ability to operate in a fast-moving environment
Hands-on approach to closing gaps in technical execution, including personally debugging a misbehaving agent in production
Demonstrated problem-solving and executive-level communication skills
Expertise in code-level AI SDKs and agent frameworks, such as LangGraph, CrewAI, and AWS Strands Agents
Knowledge of tool/function calling, RAG, vector search, structured outputs, conversation and state management, and deterministic workflows
Cloud engineering skills, preferably AWS, including managed services, containers, IAM, networking, and cost optimization
Experience deploying and maintaining production AI systems, CI/CD, tracing, incident response, and latency/cost controls
Experience with AI evaluation, including test sets, regression testing, human review, and live quality measurement
Knowledge of AI security and guardrails, including prompt injection defense, least-privilege access, audit trails, and human-in-the-loop design
Knowledge aligned with financial regulations including Model Risk Management, SOC 2, PCI DSS, and GLBA
No sponsorship is available for this position

Benefits

Comp & perks

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