Principal, Artificial Intelligence Engineering

* THIS POSITION IS NOT ELIGIBLE FOR VISA SPONSORSHIP
* What You'll Do:

OCC, the world's largest equity derivatives clearing organization, seeks a principal-level AI engineer to serve as the technical lead for the organization's recently formed AI Research & Engineering team. This senior individual contributor role is a technical leader who will lead through expertise and ensure the technical success of the team's work. The position requires a seasoned engineer with strong software engineering experience, technical leadership skills, and foundational knowledge of AI/LLMs with a keen interest in applying these technologies to financial infrastructure.

You will play a key role in executing OCC's AI roadmap while mentoring a team of talented junior engineers in driving organizational transformation. As a team leaning into emerging technology, we also support continuous growth and learning by providing time for experimentation with AI tools and technologies.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.

* Partner with the Executive Director, AI Engineering to help define and execute on OCC's AI technical roadmap

* Lead and partner on the architecture of scalable systems incorporating LLMs and AI into organizational processes and infrastructure

* Design and build production applications in support of organizational use cases

* Provide technical mentorship to junior engineers on engineering best practices and system design (no direct reports)

* Conduct code/architectural reviews ensuring production readiness, safety, and adherence to high security and compliance standards

* Implement testing, evaluation, and monitoring frameworks for AI systems including hallucination detection and bias assessment

* Establish safety guardrails and responsible AI practices for LLM applications in a regulated environment

* Connect AI agents to organizational systems and workflows

* Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend adoption strategies

* Foster continuous learning culture in a rapidly evolving AI landscape

Qualifications:

The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.

Required

* Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or related technical field

* 10+ years software engineering/systems architecture experience with strong technical leadership

* 5+ years as senior technical contributor on complex production systems

* Expert in Python and proficient in SQL

* System design expertise: monolithic and microservice architectures, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, APIs

* Hands-on experience in data (e.g., data engineering, data pipelines, data transformation)

* Foundational experience with LLMs and familiarity with multiple frontier lab models (e.g., Gemini, Claude, GPT)

* Familiarity of risk vectors in AI applications including hallucinations, bias, prompt injection, data privacy

* Experience mentoring and reviewing the work of junior engineers

* Exceptional communication skills explaining complex technical concepts

* Strong interest in AI/LLM space with demonstrated commitment to continuous learning

Preferred

* Production experience with AI applications or LLM-powered systems

* Experience with RAG architectures and context engineering

* Familiarity with diverse LLM provider APIs and experience connecting agents to systems

* Experience tinkering with frontier lab tools and products

* Cloud platforms/technologies: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD

* Infrastructure as code:
Terraform

* Experience in financial market infrastructure or derivatives industry

* Background in regulated environments

About Us

The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) is the world's largest equity derivatives clearing organization. Founded in 1973, OCC is dedicated to promoting stability and market integrity by delivering clearing and settlement services for options, futures and securities lending transactions. As a Systemically Important Financial Market Utility (SIFMU), OCC operates under the jurisdiction of the…