Director of AI Applications Development

Location: Toronto, ON; work arrangement includes a proportion of on-site and remote work to be discussed during the interview. Candidates must be legally eligible to work at the specified location and, where applicable, hold a valid work or study permit.

Company

Relationship-oriented banking organization developing modern financial services and enterprise technology solutions.

What you will do

• Lead the AI Applications Development function and guide AI engineers, developers, quality assurance specialists, and leaders.
• Direct the design, development, deployment, and ongoing evolution of enterprise-grade AI applications across the bank.
• Shape solution architecture, integration requirements, and delivery plans with technology and business partners, vendors, and senior stakeholders.
• Guide engineering decisions focused on security, scalability, performance, reliability, cloud-native delivery, observability, and compliance.
• Champion CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, documentation, test automation, and reusable engineering practices for enterprise-scale solutions.
• Prioritize and deliver initiatives within agreed timelines and budgets while supporting a shared AI strategy and developing team capabilities.

Requirements

• Recent hands-on experience designing, building, and shipping production AI applications, including writing code, reviewing pull requests, and resolving production issues.
• Hands-on experience with Python, FastAPI, JavaScript using Vue.js or React.js, SQL, Redis, and Azure Cloud services, including Azure OpenAI or AI Foundry and API Management.
• Experience with GitHub Actions and QA automation frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium.
• Experience building solutions with LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt and context engineering, tool calling, and agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, LangSmith, or equivalent.
• Ability to design for security, scalability, reliability, and compliance in a regulated enterprise environment.
• Experience mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, raising engineering standards, and leading engineers and QA specialists as the function scales.
• Ability to build trusted relationships with business and technology partners, translate business needs into practical AI solutions, and explain complex concepts to non-technical audiences.
• Strong decision-making, project management, stakeholder management, solutions design, and technical architecture capabilities.
• Curiosity, adaptability, ownership of outcomes, high standards, and relationship-oriented judgment.

Nice to have

• Experience with Databricks, LLM evaluation, and production observability for AI agents using tools such as Splunk or OpenTelemetry.

Culture & Benefits

• Inclusive environment with accessible candidate and employee experiences.
• Competitive salary, incentive pay, banking benefits, and a benefits program subject to plan terms.
• Defined benefit pension plan, employee share purchase plan, vacation offering, and wellbeing support subject to applicable terms.
• Paid Purpose Day for personal growth and development, plus a social recognition program.
• Technology-enabled workspaces and a culture focused on innovation, collaboration, continuous improvement, and meaningful client impact.

Hiring process

• The work arrangement will be discussed during the interview.
• The process may include an attribute-based assessment and skills tests such as simulation, coding, or French proficiency testing.
• Artificial intelligence tools may be used during recruitment.