Principal AI Engineer

Ontrac Solutions is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to lead the design and delivery of enterprise-grade Generative AI solutions within a regulated banking environment. The role involves collaborating with various teams to translate financial services use cases into scalable and secure AI systems.

Responsibilities:

• Own and define enterprise-grade GenAI architectures for banking and financial services use cases, including RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, prompt orchestration, and multi-model routing strategies
• Drive production readiness for GenAI solutions, ensuring scalability, resiliency, observability, latency optimization, security, and cost efficiency
• Lead complex architectural decisions across data ingestion, vector databases, model selection, guardrails, API scalability, performance optimization, and secure integration with banking systems
• Establish reference architectures, reusable patterns, and best practices to accelerate responsible GenAI adoption across lines of business
• Partner with central AI platform teams to align solution architecture with enterprise AI services, platform capabilities, banking technology standards, and long-term roadmap priorities
• Act as a Forward Deployed Principal Engineer, partnering directly with business, product, and engineering teams to deliver high-impact GenAI use cases from ideation through production
• Translate banking and financial services business problems into clear AI system designs, technical requirements, and non-functional requirements with measurable outcomes
• Support GenAI use cases across areas such as customer service, operations, knowledge management, risk, compliance, fraud, employee productivity, document intelligence, and internal workflow automation
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues across non-production and production environments
• Partner closely with application teams to ensure AI solutions integrate effectively into existing banking platforms, enterprise workflows, data environments, APIs, and control frameworks
• Influence platform roadmap by feeding real-world banking use-case requirements back into central AI services and enterprise AI platform teams
• Ensure all AI solutions align with banking risk, cyber, model governance, data protection, privacy, and regulatory expectations
• Partner with Cyber, Model Risk Management, Legal, Compliance, Risk, and Data Governance teams to design compliant AI patterns without slowing delivery
• Embed security, privacy, responsible AI, ethical AI, explainability, human oversight, and auditability into solution design by default
• Help define practical implementation patterns that balance innovation, speed, governance, regulatory expectations, and enterprise control requirements
• Ensure GenAI solutions are designed with appropriate guardrails for sensitive financial data, customer information, personally identifiable information, and regulated business processes
• Serve as a recognized GenAI expert across the enterprise, regularly consulted by engineering, architecture, product, risk, compliance, and leadership teams
• Mentor senior and staff-level engineers and help raise the technical bar across banking technology teams
• Contribute to internal communities of practice, architecture reviews, executive-level technical discussions, AI governance forums, and knowledge-sharing sessions
• Represent enterprise GenAI capabilities in internal innovation forums, banking technology discussions, and responsible AI showcases