Senior AI Application Engineer

First County Bank is a 175-year-old mutual savings bank with approximately $2.3 billion in assets, serving Fairfield County, Connecticut through 13 branches. As a mutual, we answer to our depositors and our community rather than to shareholders, which lets us take a long-term view. Relationship-focused, Community-dedicated, and High-performing are at the heart of who we are, and they will not change.

What is changing is how we work. The bank has launched a multi-year transformation to grow, modernize its operations and make better decisions with data. We have created a Data & AI Office from the ground up, and this role is central to turning that ambition into working software.

We are looking for a hands-on builder who can take a business problem from a whiteboard conversation to a secure, production-ready application. You will design and ship internal applications, data pipelines and AI-enabled tools on Microsoft Azure, using modern web front ends, relational databases and AI-assisted development with Claude Code.

This is not an architecture-only or vendor-management role. You will write code, own outcomes and work directly with bank leaders in finance, lending, wealth management, operations and compliance. Because the team is small, your work will be visible, your judgment will be trusted, and your impact on a 173-year-old institution will be real.

You will build web applications and AI agents for the kinds of problems common across banks. Typical examples include replacing spreadsheet- and Access-based reporting with governed data and dashboards; building a unified view of the customer across core banking, lending and wealth platforms; deposit retention and pricing analytics; commercial and wealth relationship analytics and referral tracking; credit monitoring and underwriting support;

automating BSA/AML and other compliance workflows with human review; streamlining document, payment and reconciliation processing in operations; and secure AI assistants and agentic workflows for staff and executives. Priorities will be set with the CDAO and business owners and will evolve as the roadmap matures.

• Design, build, test and deploy full-stack internal web applications on Azure, from data model to user interface.
• Write well-structured, performant SQL; design relational schemas, views and stored procedures that others can understand and maintain.
• Own the databases behind our web applications and AI agents: design for reliable reads and writes, tune queries and indexes, manage schema changes and migrations, and secure application and agent access to data.
• Integrate large language models (Anthropic Claude) into business workflows, including prompt design, retrieval over internal documents, tool use and structured outputs.
• Use Claude Code. MS CoPilot and other AI-assisted development tools to accelerate delivery while reviewing, testing and owning every line that ships.
• Build Power BI datasets and reports, and interactive HTML dashboards where they are the right fit.
• Deliver working prototypes in weeks, not months, and harden the ones that prove their value into production.

• Apply security by design:
  Microsoft Entra e sign-on, role-based access, secrets in Azure Key Vault, encryption in transit and at rest, and least-privilege service accounts.
• Follow the bank’s data classification and AI governance including using only approved data in approved AI tools.
• Produce documentation that eliminates key-person risk: architecture notes, data dictionaries, runbooks, lineage and change logs that an examiner or a new colleague can follow.
• Support model validation, audit and regulatory examinations with clear evidence of how…