Sr Artificial Intelligence Engineering in Chicago IL local

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.

• Partner with the Executive Director of AI Engineering to define and execute OCC's AI technical roadmap, translating organizational priorities into concrete architectural decisions
• Lead OCC's agentic AI efforts: architect, build, and operate systems that connect AI agents to internal systems, data pipelines, and business workflows
• Leverage OCC's direct relationships with AWS and Anthropic to evaluate and adopt new model capabilities and tooling as they become available
• Build and ship production AI applications on AWS using Claude and related Anthropic tooling, maintaining high standards for reliability, security, and auditability
• Architect scalable systems that integrate LLMs and AI agents into OCC's internal systems, operational workflows, and business processes, owning decisions from design through production deployment
• Serve as the primary technical mentor for junior engineers: conducting code and architecture reviews, modeling engineering best practices, and raising the team's overall technical level (no direct reports)
• Define and enforce AI safety standards appropriate for a regulated SIFMU environment, including hallucination detection, output validation, bias assessment, and audit trails that satisfy SEC and CFTC oversight expectations
• Establish responsible AI practices and safety guardrails for LLM applications operating on sensitive financial data
• Navigate OCC's change management and security review processes when deploying AI systems into production
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and provide concrete, risk-aware recommendations on adoption

Supervisory Responsibilities:

• None

Qualifications:

The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.

Required

• Experience mentoring and elevating junior engineers

Preferred

• Exceptional ability to explain complex technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders
• Background in financial market infrastructure, derivatives, or similarly regulated industries

Technical Skills:

Required

• Expert-level Python; proficient in SQL
• Deep system design expertise: distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, APIs, and MCP servers
• Hands-on experience with data engineering: pipelines, transformation, and data modeling
• AWS experience; comfort with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines
• Strong production AI/LLM experience, or demonstrated hands-on passion for the space with the engineering depth to ramp quickly
• Strong working knowledge of AI risk vectors: hallucinations, prompt injection, bias, data privacy, and output validation

Preferred

• Production experience building and operating LLM-powered applications
• Experience designing and operating agentic AI systems in enterprise environments
• Experience with context engineering strategies including RAG, prompt architecture, and retrieval pipeline design
• Familiarity with frontier models including Claude, GPT, and Gemini, and hands-on experimentation with emerging tools
• Hands-on experience with Anthropic's tooling and APIs, including the Claude API, Claude.ai, or the Anthropic Console
• Experience connecting AI agents to enterprise systems and workflows
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform)

Education and/or Experience:

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or a related technical field
• 10+ years of software engineering and systems architecture experience, with demonstrated technical leadership
• 5+ years as a senior individual contributor on complex, high-stakes production systems