Senior Director, ATOM Engineering

Job Description What is the opportunity?

RBC's AI Group has developed ATOM (Asynchronous Temporal Model), a groundbreaking proprietary AI foundation model that is transforming how RBC serves its clients. ATOM learns from billions of financial event sequences to power personalized client experiences, intelligent credit decisions, fraud detection, and innovative digital banking solutions.

As a member of RBC Borealis AI, reporting to the VP, Solutions Engineering & Delivery, the Senior Director, ATOM Engineering will lead the engineering team responsible for deploying, scaling, and operationalizing ATOM across RBC's enterprise platforms. This is a high-impact technical leadership role at the forefront of RBC's $1 billion AI ambition, where you'll translate cutting-edge AI research into production-grade solutions that serve millions of clients.

You'll build and lead a team of software engineers, ML engineers, and technical product managers who are responsible for taking ATOM from research innovation to enterprise-scale deployment. Your work will directly enable transformative AI solutions across credit, loyalty, fraud, digital channels, and beyond.

• Lead the end-to-end engineering, deployment, and support for RBC foundation models. Support delivery teams throughout the consumption of these models in production.
• Build robust, scalable, and secure software infrastructure to support ATOM's integration with RBC's enterprise platforms and the Lumina AI & Data Platform.
• Partner with VP, Applied AI and VP, Research teams to translate research on foundation models into production-ready, enterprise-grade software solutions.
• Drive the technical roadmap for ATOM (and other foundation model) engineering capabilities including model serving infrastructure, API development, integration patterns, and deployment automation.
• Ensure solutions that incorporate RBC foundation models meet RBC's performance, reliability, scalability, and security requirements for mission-critical banking applications.

• Collaborate closely with business line CIOs, product managers, and technology teams to understand and support the use of foundation models in production.
• Partner with platform teams (Lumina, AI & ML Platform, Agentic Platform) to ensure seamless integration of foundation models with RBC's AI infrastructure.
• Work with AI Governance, Model Risk, and third-party risk teams to ensure all deployments meet regulatory, compliance, and ethical AI standards.
• Engage with AI Research teams to provide feedback on model development, identify production-challenges, and influence research priorities based on deployment learnings.

• Build and lead a high-performing engineering team of software engineers, ML engineers, Dev Ops specialists, and technical product managers.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, and accountability with focus on delivering measurable business outcomes.
• Develop team capabilities in modern software engineering practices, MLOps, cloud-native architectures, and AI solution delivery.
• Mentor engineers and create career development pathways for growing technical leadership talent.

• Establish and own operational excellence for ATOM-powered solutions including monitoring, incident response, performance optimization, and continuous improvement.
• Implement robust Dev Ops and MLOps practices to enable rapid iteration, automated testing, and reliable deployment of ATOM models and features.
• Define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) for ATOM solutions including model performance, system reliability, latency, cost…