Principal Engineer AI

Principal Engineer, Ai Platform & Fabrics

BMO is building the platform capabilities that make enterprise AI safe, governed, and scalable. We are seeking experienced Principal/Senior engineers to build and operate the core infrastructure that governs how AI runs at BMO — the AI Gateway, Policy Engine, Identity Fabric, AI Registry, Guardrails Runtime, and AI Observability.

This is a build-and-run engineering role. You will be part of the team that own Enterprise AI Platform capabilities end to end:
Building, configuring and operating them in production, including on-call. You will not build the AI models or applications themselves (those are domain-owned); you build the governed platform they run on and the runtime evidence that proves they run within policy, across AWS, Azure, and Microsoft AI surfaces, under OSFI and OCC expectations.

You are a hands-on engineer who has built shared platform services at scale, cares deeply about operability, latency, and correctness, and understands that in a regulated bank the infrastructure must produce its own evidence. You are energized by taking real engineering assets that includes an existing developer portal, an AI registry, a body of policy-as-code, and gateway integrations and hardening, scaling, enhancing and governing them into enterprise-grade platform capabilities.

You raise the technical bar for those around you and mentor as you build.

Depending on your specialization, you will own one or more of the following capability areas:

• Enterprise Control Plane
• Domain Orchestration

What You'll Do

• Own capabilities end to end: design, implement, test, ship, and operate production infrastructure.
• Engineer for operability and defensibility from day one: instrumentation, SLOs, latency budgets, failure modes, and runtime evidence built in, not bolted on.
• Build the APIs, SD'able interfaces, and integrations through which domains, Dev Ops pipelines, and enterprise systems consume platform capabilities.
• Implement policy enforcement, guardrails, identity attestation, and audit as first-class engineering concerns: correct, performant, and provable.
• Ensure every capability produces runtime evidence connecting AI activity to policy enforcement, identity, and lineage for model-risk and regulatory review (OSFI E-23, OCC).
• Assess emerging AI infrastructure, foundation-model access patterns, and standards; make deliberate, cost-aware engineering choices.
• Mentor and raise the bar: set engineering standards, review designs and code, and grow depth across the team.
• Partner closely with AI Developer Experience, AI Security and AI SDLC, and the Senior AI Architect in your platform build and operations.

Education & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline (Master's preferred).
• 8+ years of software/platform engineering experience (Principal), or 5+ years (Senior), with substantial time building and operating shared platform services at enterprise scale.
• Demonstrated experience operating production infrastructure with real SLOs and on-call ownership, ideally in a regulated industry (financial services strongly preferred).
• Depth in one or more of: API gateways / traffic enforcement; policy-as-code and authorization; workload identity / zero-trust; observability and telemetry pipelines; audit/compliance data platforms.

Required Core Skills

• Platform Engineering Depth
• Capability-Specific Depth (one or more)

GenAI & Governance Context

• Working knowledge of GenAI platform patterns: LLM/AI gateways, RAG and agentic patterns, foundation models, embeddings, and guardrails — sufficient to build the infrastructure they depend on.
• Familiarity with AI/ML platforms (Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Sage Maker, MLflow) and orchestration frameworks (Lang Chain, Llama Index).
• Grounding in Responsible AI, AI/data governance, privacy, cloud security, and IAM as applied to AI workloads.

Certifications (Preferred)

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate/Professional) / ML – Specialty
• Microsoft Certified:
  Azure Solutions Architect Expert / Azure AI Engineer Associate
• Security/identity certifications (relevant to Identity Fabric roles)
• Databricks / Google Cloud ML…