AVP AI Platform Engineer

Independent Bank•Troy, MI

About The Position

As our AVP, AI Platform Engineer, you’ll be at the center of building the future of AI at Independent Bank—designing, administering, securing, and continuously advancing the Bank’s AI platforms and AI-enabled solutions. In this highly impactful role, you’ll blend hands-on platform engineering with applied research and development, solution architecture, and operational support to turn innovative ideas into reliable, production-ready capabilities. You’ll own and manage our enterprise AI tools—including n8n, Retell, and ChatGPT Enterprise—while designing and deploying local AI inference solutions that push the boundaries of what’s possible. Partnering closely with business, technology, data, security, and risk teams, you’ll deliver AI solutions that are not only secure, scalable, and resilient, but that also drive clear, measurable business value across the organization.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
5+ years of experience in systems engineering, cloud engineering, software engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure, or a related technical field.
Demonstrated experience supporting enterprise applications, APIs, integrations, and production technology platforms; strong experience with Docker/containerization, Linux administration, networking, authentication, secrets management, and scripting or programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, or TypeScript.
Experience with AI/ML platforms, large language models, model APIs, agentic workflows, automation platforms, or related technologies.

Nice To Haves

Experience with n8n, Retell, ChatGPT Enterprise, Azure AI services, local inference environments, GPU-enabled hardware, model-serving frameworks, or open-weight models is preferred.
Strong analytical, troubleshooting, documentation, project-management, and communication skills; ability to clearly explain complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Experience in financial services, regulated environments, cloud platforms, Azure Entra ID, Azure Key Vault, SQL Server, GitHub, CI/CD, or technology governance is preferred.

Responsibilities

Administer and support the Bank’s AI platforms, including n8n, Retell, ChatGPT Enterprise, and related services, with responsibility for configuration, access, integrations, environments, vendor coordination, and platform lifecycle management.
Design, build, deploy, and maintain the AI platform capabilities, reusable services, development standards, integrations, and tooling that enable developers to securely create and operate AI-enabled workflows, automations, agents, and business solutions.
Design and implement local AI inference solutions, including hardware selection, deployment, networking, containerization, model hosting, security segmentation, performance tuning, and operational support.
Evaluate, test, benchmark, and recommend AI models, tools, frameworks, and infrastructure based on quality, latency, cost, security, reliability, and business fit.
Lead applied AI research and development efforts, creating proofs of concept and technical recommendations that can be transitioned into governed production solutions.
Establish and maintain technical standards for AI platforms, including authentication, authorization, secrets management, logging, monitoring, change management, resiliency, and incident response.
Monitor platform health, utilization, costs, performance, capacity, and security events; identify and implement improvements proactively.
Partner with AI, Data Management, IT Operations, and Cyber teams to design secure, scalable, and supportable AI platform architecture, standards, and operating models.
Create and maintain technical documentation, architecture diagrams, operating procedures, support materials, and platform roadmaps.
Support AI governance requirements by ensuring platforms and solutions follow approved data handling, vendor management, security, model risk, and change-control practices.
Other job duties as required.