Principal AI Engineer

Job Title: Principal AI Engineer

Industry: FinTech

Contract Duration: 6 months (rolling)

Location: New York, NY (Hybrid)

Hourly Rate: $100 - $150 per hour

The Role:

• You'll take ownership of AI strategy and delivery across a fast-moving fintech platform, shaping how intelligent systems are built and scaled in a highly regulated environment
• Working closely with engineering and product stakeholders, you'll spot where AI can make the biggest difference and turn those opportunities into production-ready solutions
• You'll lead the design and build of agent-based and hybrid AI systems, blending classical ML techniques with modern LLM capabilities to tackle real operational challenges
• Quality and reliability will be central to your work, you'll put in place the evaluation frameworks, test suites, and monitoring needed to keep AI systems performing in production
• This is a hands-on leadership role; you'll be coding and architecting alongside a team of AI engineers, setting the standard for how the work gets done
• You'll bring a pragmatic, delivery-focused mindset, cutting through complexity to ship solutions that genuinely move the needle for the business
• Keeping pace with the AI landscape is part of the job, you'll bring emerging techniques and tools into the team's thinking and translate them into practical advantage
• Mentoring and growing the engineers around you will be just as important as your individual technical contribution

Skills Needed:

• Strong Python engineering background with 8+ years in software development, ideally with exposure to financial services or similarly regulated sectors
• Deep practical experience with LLM-based systems and agent frameworks, you've shipped something real using LangChain, LlamaIndex, Agents SDK, or similar
• Comfortable working across the AI stack, from classical ML models through to RAG pipelines and vector search
• Experience setting up evaluation and observability tooling for AI in production, you know how to catch quality degradation before users do
• Solid grasp of data infrastructure including relational databases, caching layers, and event streaming technologies
• Cloud experience, particularly AWS, with familiarity around AI workflow orchestration and cloud-native deployment patterns
• You're as comfortable influencing senior stakeholders as you are reviewing a pull request, strong communication skills are a must
• A track record of delivering in complex, fast-moving environments where the goalposts sometimes move

Research indicates that men will apply to a role when they meet only 50-60% of the requirements, while women and other underrepresented groups often look for a 90-100% match. If this role excites you but you don't tick every single box, please still apply. We'd love to hear from you.