Senior AI Engineer

The Senior AI Engineer will bridge AI experimentation and production engineering, helping operationalize AI systems into reliable, secure, enterprise-ready solutions. This role works cross-functionally to deliver scalable AI capabilities while aligning with compliance and governance requirements.

Responsibilities

• Perform and lead system analysis and programming to transform AI proofs of concept into production-ready software, including research when no established pattern exists.
• Ensure timely, high-quality delivery into production and provide technical engineering support for new and existing applications through retirement.
• Develop, test, and review applications based on business requirements and industry best practices.
• Use best practices, standard guidance, and agentic development workflows to create and modify code.
• Assess how code changes may impact end users and internal teams.
• Review code authored by less experienced team members.
• Collaborate with quality and security partners, including cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and AI governance, to deliver high-quality products on schedule.
• Work across teams as projects dictate and lead critical tasks and deliverables without assistance.
• Set and update expectations for scope, timelines, and delivery size; participate in cross-functional meetings and discussions, including leading them.
• Create required technical documentation and adhere to documented departmental and corporate standards.
• Participate in defining and documenting standards, including what “production-ready” means for AI systems at Jack Henry.
• Lead unit tests, integration tests, and evals to ensure reliability, security, and performance, with emphasis on AI systems and workflows.
• Debug and troubleshoot issues as they arise, including AI-specific failure modes such as quality drift, prompt regressions, provider outages, and cost spikes.
• May contribute to product architecture and perform other duties as assigned.
• Build and support production AI capabilities, including AI Gateway services, MCP integrations, agent frameworks, self-hosted inference, and AI-powered applications.
• Develop testing, evaluation, monitoring, logging, and observability practices to keep AI systems dependable, scalable, and auditable in production.
• Partner with cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, architecture, and business teams to design and deliver AI solutions meeting enterprise standards.
• Improve AI system performance through model evaluation, operational monitoring, quality assurance, and continuous improvement.
• Mentor engineers, establish AI development best practices, and support organization-wide adoption of AI technologies and agentic development workflows.

Requirements

• Minimum 6 years of technical experience in software development.
• Production ownership of AI systems, including AI agents, AI features in products, MCP servers, and similar capabilities.
• Experience with a major cloud environment: GCP, AWS, or Azure.
• Experience with unit testing and end-to-end automated testing.
• Experience with Kubernetes.
• Experience with large language models (LLM) and/or vector databases.
• Comfort with ambiguity and shifting priorities.
• Self-directed approach and willingness to push through roadblocks rather than wait them out.
• Ability to travel up to 10% to attend internal meetings, training, and/or professional conferences.

Technologies

• GCP, AWS, Azure
• Kubernetes
• Large language models (LLM)
• Vector databases
• AI Gateway services
• MCP integrations
• Agent frameworks
• Self-hosted inference
• Unit testing, end-to-end automated testing
• Observability

Benefits

Outstanding benefit programs to ensure the physical, mental, and financial well-being of people is always met.

Location and Work Schedule

This position is hybrid, requiring at least 1 day per week in any of the following office locations: Allen, TX; Louisville, KY; Birmingham, AL; Cedar Falls, IA; Charlotte, NC; Overland Park, KS; Monett, MO; Springfield, MO.

Immigration Sponsorship

This position is ineligible for immigration sponsorship and support. Please do not apply if you will need immigration support now or in the future (for example, H-1B, PERM).

What Would Be Nice to Have

• Bachelor’s degree.
• Fintech experience.
• Experience with GCP and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Experience in cloud security and DevOps.
• Experience with model fine-tuning, evaluation (including controlling for bias), and validation.
• Experience with AI observability, evals, and model monitoring.