Head of Forward Deployed Engineering (AI)

Location: Buffalo, New York, United States of America

Salary: $139,700–$232,900 annual USD

Company

M&T Bank is a financial services organization developing and operating enterprise technology and AI capabilities.

What you will do

• Lead, mentor, hire, and develop a team of 10–20 Forward Deployed Engineers.
• Own the technical delivery of concurrent AI engagements across multiple business units.
• Partner with business and technology stakeholders to identify use cases, define architectures, and deliver production AI solutions.
• Align business-unit solutions with enterprise AI platforms, architecture standards, governance, security, and risk controls.
• Drive reuse of centralized AI services, tooling, and engineering components while identifying platform gaps and recurring business needs.
• Manage staffing, budgets, vendors, reporting, performance management, and strategic engineering priorities.

Requirements

• At least 11 years of combined higher education and/or work experience, including 4 years in engineering or architecture and 5 years of leadership experience with people management.
• Experience delivering software, data, machine learning, or AI solutions with business and product stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying production AI applications using LLMs, RAG, AI agents, model APIs, or machine learning models.
• Strong knowledge of solution architecture, software engineering, application development, production support, testing, code review, CI/CD, and security.
• Experience managing multiple complex initiatives, geographically distributed teams, competing priorities, and executive communications.
• Understanding of AI governance, risk management, regulatory requirements, model governance, and responsible AI practices.

Nice to have

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Experience leading Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Professional Services Engineering, or Customer Engineering organizations.
• Experience delivering AI solutions in financial services, healthcare, insurance, or other highly regulated industries.
• Experience scaling engineering organizations and working with centralized platform, architecture, governance, or enablement functions.

Culture & Benefits

• Work supports collaboration, innovation, continuous learning, belonging, and employee development.
• The role follows enterprise risk, regulatory, audit, internal control, and security standards.
• Responsibilities include ongoing coaching, succession planning, performance management, and development of engineering talent.