Applied AI Manager

Engineering/ Product/ Tech
· New York, USA
· Full-time

At Cardo AI, we've been on a mission since 2018 to make Private Credit and Asset-Based Finance (ABF) markets more accessible and efficient. Today, with over $40 billion in assets under technology, our platform empowers banks, trustees, and investors to accelerate growth through smarter strategies, faster transactions, and optimized investment portfolios.

Driven by a bold vision to help grow the ABF market beyond $40 trillion, we're building a future defined by speed, confidence, and innovation. By combining automated workflows, comprehensive data, and AI-driven insights, we transform complexity into opportunity, enabling our clients to unlock growth and stay ahead.

The Data Science & AI team is growing, and we are looking for an Applied AI Manager to lead our application of AI across the platform and the business. You will work on genuinely hard problems: structured finance data is complex, high‑stakes, and largely unstructured, and you will build systems that actually change how the market operates. This is not a research role — we need someone who ships.

Lead the design and delivery of complex ML and GenAI systems — robust, scalable, and built for production.

Guide the team across the full AI lifecycle, from experimentation and evaluation through deployment and monitoring, with a strong focus on reproducibility and reliability.

Drive architectural decisions for data‑intensive, AI‑driven applications, making sharp trade‑offs between cutting‑edge approaches and production readiness.

Apply NLP and GenAI to extract structure from unstructured financial documents: credit agreements, indentures, and servicer reports.

Build and deploy models that operate on structured finance data, where a logic error has real financial consequences.

Mentor and grow engineers across levels, building a high‑performing team with a strong engineering culture.

Collaborate cross‑functionally with Product, Data, and Business teams to shape roadmaps and deliver real impact.

Champion AI adoption across the organization and influence company‑wide technology strategy.

Proven experience leading engineering teams in a fast‑paced, high‑growth environment.

Solid understanding of structured finance: loan tapes, cash flow waterfalls, ABS/CLO structures, and priority of payments.

Strong software engineering skills (Python preferred) combined with deep knowledge of AI/ML frameworks, GenAI tooling, and modern data infrastructure.

Hands‑on experience building and deploying ML/GenAI systems in production within finance, legal, or other high‑complexity, data‑heavy domains.

Ability to lead architectural discussions and technical trade‑offs without losing sight of the details.

Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and modern MLOps practices.

Commitment to people development: mentoring, performance conversations, and building high‑performing teams.

Bonus: experience with NLP on financial contracts, RAG or LLM‑based applications on structured data, large‑scale loan data pipelines, or containerization tooling (Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform).

Competitive salary and performance‑based bonus.

Stock option plan.

Regular team events and annual retreats.

Opportunities for career growth within a fast‑scaling fintech innovator.

A collaborative, innovative, and entrepreneurial culture that values creativity, initiative, and impact.