Director, Agentic Engineering

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Fifth Third Bank provides a variety of career development opportunities to help you build and sustain a strong future. We are proud of our workforce and of our employees' desire to stretch, learn and grow.

About the Role

Fifth Third is standing up a new Agentic Engineering team within Technology. We are building autonomous agents, multi-agent architectures, and the platform capabilities that make them safe, observable, and production-ready inside a regulated financial institution. The Director of Agentic Engineering will build and lead this team from the ground up while remaining deeply hands-on in architecture and code.

This is a player-coach role. You will lead a team of engineers and design and deliver agent systems in production. The work spans agentic platform engineering, safety and governance, developer experience, and executive stakeholder partnership. You will own the technical vision for how autonomous agents operate at the bank - from approved architectural patterns and guardrail enforcement to the APIs, SDKs, and tooling that enable other teams to build AI solutions securely and efficiently.

What You Will Do
Agentic Platform & Architecture

• Design and build autonomous agent and multi-agent systems for high-value bank workflows.
• Define and implement tool-use patterns, agent orchestration, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations that enable agents to operate safely across enterprise systems.
• Write and review production code in critical system components - this role leads by example.
• Establish approved architectural patterns for agentic development, enabling teams across the organization to build and explore AI solutions securely.

Safety, Governance & Guardrails

• Own the guardrail enforcement layer for agentic systems - designing, implementing, and continuously improving safety controls for autonomous agent behavior.
• Partner with risk, compliance, legal, and information security to ensure agent systems meet regulatory and enterprise governance requirements.
• Build evaluation, observability, and debugging capabilities that provide transparency into agent decision-making, tool usage, and failure modes.
• Define agent governance standards that align with enterprise risk appetite and regulatory expectations.

Developer Experience & Enablement

• Build and maintain APIs, SDKs, and developer tooling that accelerate safe AI development across the enterprise.
• Define and secure approved patterns and reference architectures that lower the barrier to responsible agentic development.
• Create reusable frameworks, templates, and playbooks that convert repeatable patterns into organizational assets.

Leadership & Delivery

• Recruit, hire, and build the Agentic Engineering teams
• Mentor and coach engineers across career levels - developing individual contributors into technical leaders who are both technically excellent and deeply user-oriented.
• Partner with senior business and technology leaders to identify where autonomous agents can deliver measurable business impact.
• Establish delivery patterns for safe experimentation, piloting, production release, measurement, and ongoing support.
• Maintain a practical view of emerging AI capabilities and where they can be responsibly applied inside a regulated financial institution.

What We Are Looking For

• Experience leading highly technical engineering teams responsible for production systems at enterprise scale.
• Hands-on experience building with AI agent frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, Deep Agents) and deploying agentic systems to production.
• Direct experience building and deploying MCP servers and tool-use integrations.
• Strong background in cloud architecture and system design on AWS (Bedrock, Lambda, Fargate, IAM, networking).
• Production coding proficiency across multiple languages (Python, TypeScript/Node.js preferred).
• Extensive experience in automation, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and platform engineering.
• Proven track record delivering world-class AI-based architecture aligned with successful business outcomes.
• Background in security, enterprise architecture, or systems engineering sufficient to partner credibly with risk and compliance teams.
• Experience working in banking, financial services, or another regulated industry.
• Ability to operate as a player-coach - setting technical direction, reviewing code, and developing people simultaneously.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to separate high-value agent applications from novelty.
• Clear communication style, especially when translating between business, engineering, and risk stakeholders.

Helpful Experience

• Experience with agent-to-agent (A2A) communication patterns and multi-agent coordination.
• Background in developer experience, internal platform engineering, or API/SDK design.
• Experience with agent evaluation frameworks, LLM observability tooling, and production debugging of non-deterministic systems.
• Understanding of enterprise AI risk, model governance, and responsible AI practices in regulated environments.
• Published work, internal or external, on agent architecture, orchestration patterns, or enforcement systems.
• Familiarity with React for agent UI delivery channels.
• Industry-relevant certifications such as AWS Certified Generative AI Developer - Professional, AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, GitHub Certified: Agentic AI Developer, or Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer.

Supervisory Responsibilities

Direct supervisory responsibility for hiring, performance management, coaching, and career development.

Minimum Knowledge, Skills & Abilities Required

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Demonstrated expertise in LLM integration, AI/ML systems, and agentic architecture patterns.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, cloud architecture, DevOps/SRE, or platform engineering.
• At least 5 years in a hands-on engineering leadership role with direct reports.
• Production experience designing and operating distributed systems on AWS.
• Demonstrated ability to write production-quality code while leading teams.
• Strong understanding of cloud security, identity/access control, and enterprise governance patterns.
• Must be able to communicate ideas clearly - both verbally and in writing - to engineering, business, and executive stakeholders.

Work Environment

Hybrid role. Candidates must be located in the Farmington Hills / Metro Detroit, Michigan area. No fully remote candidates.

Position not available for immigration sponsorship.
Director, Agentic Engineering

At Fifth Third, we understand the importance of recognizing our employees for the role they play in improving the lives of our customers, communities and each other. Our Total Rewards include comprehensive benefits and differentiated compensation offerings to give each employee the opportunity to be their best every day.

The base salary for this position is reflective of the range of salary levels for all roles within this pay grade across the U.S. Individual salaries within this range will vary based on factors such as role, relevant skillset, relevant experience, education and geographic location. In addition to the base salary, this role is eligible to participate in an incentive compensation plan, with any such payment based upon company, line of business and/or individual performance.

Our extensive benefits programs are designed to support the individual needs of our employees and their families, encompassing physical, financial, emotional and social well-being. You can learn more about those programs on our 53.com Careers page at: or by consulting with your talent acquisition partner.

LOCATION -- Farmington Hills, Michigan 48334

Attention search firms and staffing agencies: do not submit unsolicited resumes for this posting. Fifth Third does not accept resumes from any agency that does not have an active agreement with Fifth Third. Any unsolicited resumes - no matter how they are submitted - will be considered the property of Fifth Third and Fifth Third will not be responsible for any associated fee.

Fifth Third Bank, National Association is proud to have an engaged and inclusive culture and to promote and ensure equal employment opportunity in all employment decisions regardless of race, color, gender, national origin, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, military status, veteran status or any other legally protected status.