NO SPONSORSHIP - NO OPT
Principal, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engineer
SALARY: $200K - $205k plus 30% bonus
LOCATION: Chicago, IL
Hybrid 3 days onsite
The AI Research and engineering team is looking for a strong software engineering tech leader to help define and execute the AI technical roadmap. You will incorporate LLM and AI into processes and infrastructure, large language models (LLMs). You will have 10 years software engineering system experience architecture.
This is a senior individual contributor role by design. You won't manage people; you'll do the work, set the technical standard, and lead through expertise. You'll be the primary driver of agentic AI capabilities, architecting and building the systems that connect AI agents to real enterprise workflows in one of the most consequential and carefully regulated environments in financial markets.
Partner with the Executive Director of AI Engineering to define and execute AI technical roadmap, translating organizational priorities into concrete architectural decisions
Lead agentic AI efforts: architect, build, and operate systems that connect AI agents to internal systems, data pipelines, and business workflows
Leverage 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 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
Qualifications:
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
Familiarity with frontier models including Claude, GPT, and Gemini, and hands-on experimentation with emerging tools
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
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