VP, Head of Frontier Technology

Location Designation:
Hybrid - 3 days per quarter

AI capability is advancing faster than any single enterprise can track from one location, and the organizations setting the pace — the frontier AI research labs and the hyperscale cloud and AI platform providers — are concentrated on the West Coast. New York Life needs a senior leader embedded in that ecosystem, accountable both for the relationships and for what the firm builds as a result.

This is a leadership role in two distinct senses. It is a coverage role: the Vice President is New York Life's designated senior point of contact for frontier AI labs and hyperscaler platform providers, owning the technical dialogue, the early visibility that comes with those relationships, and senior AI leadership coverage in the Pacific time zone. It is also a people and delivery leadership role: the Vice President builds and leads a team that delivers in-house AI solutions — and the business cases behind them — into production.

The scope of the role is the New York Life AI Center of Excellence (AI CoE), across three dimensions: process, platform, and people. The Vice President owns how AI work moves to production, what the AI CoE builds on and how governance is integrated into it, and the recruiting and upskilling that supply the capability to deliver. All three are accountable to the same outcome — production deliveries — and the mandate is explicitly not innovation for innovation's sake.

• Serve as New York Life's designated senior relationship owner for frontier AI research labs and hyperscale cloud and AI platform and NYL solution providers — the primary impetus for establishing a West Coast presence.
• Own the technical dialogue with these providers: model and product roadmaps, research directions, pre-release and early-access programs, and capacity and platform considerations, in partnership with Enterprise Architecture, Sourcing, and Information Security.
• Maintain a defined coverage model — named providers, engagement cadence, briefing and roadmap review schedule, and a documented view of each provider's trajectory against the NYL AI CoE's needs.
• Represent New York Life at technical conferences, research forums, and industry events where senior representation is expected, and act as a consistent point of contact for the external AI community.
• Translate coverage into actionable intelligence for AI, technology, and business leadership: what is changing, what it means for the AI CoE roadmap and architecture, and what the firm should do about it.

• Own the AI CoE's software development lifecycle: how an initiative moves from hypothesis and evaluation through prototype, pilot, production, and ongoing monitoring, with defined entry and exit criteria at each stage.
• Establish the engineering practices particular to AI systems: evaluation-driven development, dataset and prompt versioning, regression and safety testing, red-teaming, human-in-the-loop review, and CI/CD adapted for models and agents.
• Design governance, risk, security, privacy, and compliance checkpoints into the lifecycle so approvals are a planned step rather than a late-stage obstacle.
• Own post-deployment discipline: observability, model and prompt change management, drift and quality monitoring, incident response, and deprecation and migration playbooks as providers retire and replace models.
• Measure and improve cycle time from idea to production, and publish the lifecycle as the standard that delivery teams across New York Life can follow.

• Own the identification,…