Senior Associate - AI Engineer

New York Life is hiring a Senior Associate - AI Engineer to support the Tech Data AI Ventures organization and the Artificial Intelligence & Data organization. This hybrid role (3 days per week) focuses on delivering AI/ML solutions that are designed to create enterprise value, with responsible AI practices across the full model lifecycle.

What you’ll do

• Partner with data, technology, product, and business teams to execute AI/ML initiatives.
• Deliver business-aligned OKRs that keep AI work outcome-driven and tied to measurable enterprise value.
• Own end-to-end model development, including data exploration, feature engineering, training and validation, deployment, monitoring, and iterative improvement.
• Design, build, and validate machine learning models across supervised and unsupervised approaches (for example: classification, regression, survival analysis, clustering), with emphasis on model selection, evaluation strategy, and production readiness.
• Apply statistical methods and experimentation techniques, including hypothesis testing, causal inference, and A/B testing, to support evidence-based decisions.
• Develop and help operationalize models using AWS/GCP (including SageMaker and Bedrock) and modern data platforms (Snowflake and Databricks), ensuring quality, security, and scalability.
• Collaborate with ML engineers to support large-scale production deployment and scaling.
• Assist in designing and evaluating agentic and AI-powered solutions that automate routine business tasks with human-in-the-loop checkpoints, escalation thresholds, and safety guardrails.
• Support LLM and RAG initiatives, including vector stores, embeddings, retrieval optimization, and prompt orchestration, with evaluators focused on reliability.
• Ensure AI capabilities are usable by business teams through APIs, dashboards, and integrated workflow applications.
• Build lightweight UI prototypes (such as Streamlit) to validate usability and support adoption.
• Follow model governance, documentation, testing, and CI/CD best practices in partnership with MLOps.

What you bring

• An advanced degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, AI, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related quantitative field.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying ML models for real-world business problems, including feature engineering, model selection, validation strategies, and performance monitoring.
• A strong foundation in statistics and machine learning, including supervised/unsupervised methods, probabilistic modeling, and model interpretability (for example, SHAP).
• Proficiency in Python and SQL, plus working knowledge of core software engineering practices such as version control (Git/GitHub), testing, and documentation.
• Working knowledge of Generative AI concepts, including LLMs, prompt engineering, and RAG.
• Exposure to agentic AI architectures such as tool-using agents and orchestration frameworks.
• Ability to partner with business stakeholders and communicate model design and outcomes to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strong communication skills, a collaborative mindset, and a proactive approach to continuous learning.
• Experience in Life Insurance or consumer finance is a plus.

Salary and role details

• Location: New York, NY (Hybrid - 3 days per week)
• Requisition ID: 95310
• Department: Tech Data AI Ventures
• Job Level: LEVELPF3
• Salary Range: $100,000 to $143,000 annually
• Overtime: Exempt
• Discretionary bonus: Eligible
• Sales bonus: Not eligible

Benefits

• Leave programs
• Adoption assistance
• Student loan repayment programs
• Annual discretionary bonus
• Employees may be eligible to participate in an incentive program

New York Life provides a full package of benefits for employees, including unique offerings for a modern workforce. Learn more via the NYL Benefits Site.

Inclusion

Fostering an inclusive workplace is fundamental to how New York Life serves its communities.