Principal, Artificial Intelligence Engineering

* THIS POSITION IS NOT ELIGIBLE FOR VISA SPONSORSHIP
* To be considered for this position, applications and resumes are accepted only through our careers site by directly applying to the posted job. We do not accept unsolicited resumes or sales solicitations from staffing agencies. Any OCC employee wishing to submit a referral must do so through their Workday account. Any resume submitted outside of an active job posting will not be considered for employment.

What You'll Do

OCC is the world's largest equity derivatives clearing organization-the infrastructure that settles every U.S. options trade. We've recently formed a dedicated AI Research & Engineering team, and we're looking for a Principal AI Engineer to serve as its technical anchor.

This is a senior individual contributor role by design. You won't manage people; you'll do the work, set the technical standard, and lead through expertise. You'll be the primary driver of OCC's agentic AI capabilities, architecting and building the systems that connect AI agents to real enterprise workflows in one of the most consequential and carefully regulated environments in financial markets.

You'll shape OCC's AI roadmap alongside the Executive Director of AI Engineering, mentor junior engineers, and have time for experimentation with frontier tools. Our team works directly with AWS and Anthropic, accessing Claude models through both.

If you're a seasoned engineer who wants to stay hands-on, lead through technical excellence, and build agentic AI systems that matter this role was written for you.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.

* Partner with the Executive Director of AI Engineering to define and execute OCC's AI technical roadmap, translating organizational priorities into concrete architectural decisions

* Lead OCC's agentic AI efforts: architect, build, and operate systems that connect AI agents to internal systems, data pipelines, and business workflows

* Leverage OCC's direct relationships with AWS and Anthropic to evaluate and adopt new model capabilities and tooling as they become available

* Build and ship production AI applications on AWS using Claude and related Anthropic tooling, maintaining high standards for reliability, security, and auditability

* Architect scalable systems that integrate LLMs and AI agents into OCC's internal systems, operational workflows, and business processes, owning decisions from design through production deployment

* Serve as the primary technical mentor for junior engineers: conducting code and architecture reviews, modeling engineering best practices, and raising the team's overall technical level (no direct reports)

* Define and enforce AI safety standards appropriate for a regulated SIFMU environment, including hallucination detection, output validation, bias assessment, and audit trails that satisfy SEC and CFTC oversight expectations

* Establish responsible AI practices and safety guardrails for LLM applications operating on sensitive financial data

* Navigate OCC's change management and security review processes when deploying AI systems into production

* Evaluate emerging AI technologies and provide concrete, risk-aware recommendations on adoption

Supervisory Responsibilities:

* None

Qualifications:

The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.

Required

* Experience mentoring and elevating junior engineers

Preferred

* Exceptional ability to explain complex technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders

* Background in financial market infrastructure, derivatives, or similarly regulated industries

Technical

Skills:

Required

* Expert-level Python; proficient in SQL

* Deep system design expertise: distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, APIs, and MCP servers

* Hands-on experience with data engineering: pipelines, transformation, and data modeling

* AWS experience; comfort with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines

* Strong production AI/LLM experience, or demonstrated hands-on passion for the space with the engineering depth to ramp quickly

* Strong working knowledge of AI risk vectors: hallucinations, prompt injection, bias, data privacy, and output validation

Preferred

* Production experience building and operating LLM-powered applications

* Experience designing and operating agentic AI systems in enterprise environments

* Experience with context engineering strategies including RAG, prompt architecture, and retrieval pipeline design

* Familiarity with frontier models including Claude, GPT, and Gemini, and hands-on experimentation with emerging tools

* Hands-on experience with Anthropic's tooling and APIs, including the Claude API, Claude.ai, or the Anthropic Console

* Experience connecting AI agents to enterprise systems and workflows

* Infrastructure as code…