Senior Applied AI Engineer

**THE OPPORTUNITY** AKUVO is seeking a senior, hands-on engineer to lead the technical execution of applied-AI capabilities across AKUVO IQ and the Data & Analytics organization. Working closely with the SVP of Data & Analytics, you will help shape the technical approach and own the architecture, development, integration, evaluation, deployment, and ongoing improvement of AI product functionality and capabilities. You will build AI experiences grounded in governed data, predictive intelligence, customer configuration, and real financial-institution workflows, and support the internal AI agents used across the model- and software-development lifecycles. As the technical owner of the Data team’s applied-AI layer, you will operate with limited technical supervision — setting architecture and standards rather than working to someone else’s design. The role spans applied-AI engineering, production software development, evaluation, observability, and usage analytics, working across product, data, ML, engineering, domain, and compliance teams. **LOCATION** Local in Malvern/Philadelphia first, widening to surrounding areas such as New Jersey, New York, Delaware, while continuing to expand geographically in a hybrid/remote capacity based on location. **KEY RESPONSIBILITIES** - Lead the technical execution of AKUVO’s applied-AI strategy, shaping the technical approach for AI capabilities across AKUVO IQ, Data & Analytics products, and related internal workflows. - Own the architecture, development, integration, deployment, and ongoing improvement of AI product functionality — including agent orchestration, tools, retrieval and grounding, structured outputs, and multi-step workflows — integrating with AKUVO IQ, predictive scores, portfolio data, and customer-specific configurations through governed context. - Build configurable AI capabilities and the workflows that turn customer policies, procedures, and requirements into structured, reviewable, versioned configurations — with testing, approval, and rollback. - Develop automated evaluation and guardrails — covering response quality, groundedness, task completion, tool use, policy adherence, and safety, and protecting against prompt injection, data leakage, and unreliable tool execution — partnering with domain specialists to turn real financial-institution scenarios into test datasets. - Build production observability for AI — quality, traces, errors, latency, token consumption, tool activity, usage, and operating cost. - Evaluate models, frameworks, and technical approaches across quality, reliability, security, performance, maintainability, and cost, avoiding unnecessary lock-in to any single provider. - Instrument and analyze how customers use AKUVO’s AI products, and review internal AI-usage analytics across AKUVO, to drive refinement, automation, and prioritized enhancements. - Support the internal agents used by the Data & Analytics team across the model- and software-development lifecycles — requirements, development, testing, regression, documentation, deployment, monitoring, and triage. - Partner across Data Engineering, ML, Product, Platform Engineering, Security, Domain, and Compliance to ground AI in governed data and meet AKUVO’s product, data-protection, and governance requirements. - Produce technical documentation and operational guidance, promote responsible AI-assisted engineering, and keep the architecture reusable and flexible enough to support new capabilities, products, and customer use cases. **SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE** - 6+ years of professional software engineering, building and operating production applications or services, with strong Python and experience building APIs, backend services, and integrations. - Able to own AKUVO’s applied-AI layer end-to-end with limited technical supervision — setting architecture, evaluation standards, and engineering patterns that others build against, and holding production accountability when AI behaves unexpectedly. - 2+ yea…