Lead AI Software Engineer - NYC AI Labs – Investment Management

J Harlan Group is currently conducting a search for a Lead AI Software Engineer to join the firm's AI Engineering team at a prominent global Investment Manager.

This role offers the opportunity to collaborate with talented engineers, product owners, business partners, senior stakeholders, and technology leaders building high-impact AI products with leverage across the firm.

As a Lead Software Engineer on T. Rowe Price Labs' AI Engineering team
, you will lead the architecture, design, and delivery of complex production-grade AI agents and intelligent systems
. You will lead the incubation of new AI products, drive experimentation with emerging technologies and innovative ideas, and partner with business-aligned technology teams to enable broader adoption at enterprise scale.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an experienced engineer with deep software and AI engineering expertise who enjoys solving complex and ambiguous problems, mentoring engineers, and shaping technical direction. You will guide the development of reusable AI capabilities, influence engineering standards across teams, and help define the future of AI engineering across the firm.

What makes this opportunity particularly compelling is the combination of deep software engineering, production AI, architecture, and technical leadership
. The team is building sophisticated systems incorporating AI agents, agent orchestration, tool and function calling, retrieval-based systems, prompt and context engineering, evaluation frameworks, observability, guardrails, failure handling, and modern cloud-native infrastructure.

The position is not focused on AI research or training foundation models. Instead, it focuses on architecting, building, product ionizing, and scaling modern AI applications and intelligent systems that are reliable, measurable, secure, cost-effective, and capable of operating within a sophisticated enterprise environment.

The firm's AI Labs focuses on building its next generation of data and AI capabilities and developing high-impact technology solutions that can ultimately be scaled across the organization

• Lead the architecture, design, development, deployment, and evolution of complex production-grade AI agents and intelligent systems.
• Set technical direction for AI solutions, making informed trade-offs across models, orchestration patterns, retrieval, tools, data, infrastructure, latency, cost, security, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Lead teams through ambiguous and technically complex AI problems, from experimentation and architecture through production adoption and scale.
• Define and evolve engineering standards for production AI, including evaluation, testing, observability, guardrails, failure handling, security, and responsible deployment.
• Guide the development of reusable AI capabilities and shared platform components across areas such as agent orchestration, tool use, retrieval-based systems, evaluation frameworks, observability, and guardrails.
• Evaluate emerging models, frameworks, tools, and AI engineering approaches and provide technical direction on when and how they should be adopted.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership and mentorship to engineers, raising the bar on architecture, engineering quality, problem solving, and execution.
• Lead technical design and code reviews and help resolve complex engineering challenges across teams and systems.
• Drive the Build-Operate-Transfer model by incubating new AI products, hardening them for production, and partnering with business-aligned technology teams to transition proven solutions for long-term ownership and scale.
• Ensure AI systems achieve measurable quality,…