Director of Engineering, AI Frontiers

Royal Bank of Canada • Toronto, ON

3d • Hybrid

About The Position

The AI Frontiers team exists to close the gap between frontier AI capabilities and enterprise adoption. The gap is real: frontier models, agentic platforms, and AI-native tooling advance on a weekly cycle. Internal adoption moves on a quarterly or annual one. The team's mandate is to scan the landscape at the speed it moves, evaluate what matters with enterprise rigor, prove business value through hands-on prototypes, and produce findings that pull adoption from business lines.
This role leads the technical work of that mission. You will manage a small team of AI engineers, drive hands-on evaluation and prototyping, build the tooling and infrastructure the team depends on, and ensure that evaluation recommendations are grounded in working code, not vendor demos. You will also be a practitioner yourself: the team practices what it preaches, and every role carries explicit expectations for AI-augmented work.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years in a technical lead or engineering management role
• Practical experience building and evaluating AI systems, including LLM-based applications, agentic pipelines, and RAG architectures
• Comfort working at the frontier: you follow model releases, track agentic frameworks, and have opinions about what matters and what is hype
• Strong engineering judgment: you know when to build a prototype in a day and when depth is warranted
• Ability to communicate technical findings in plain language to non-technical stakeholders
• Experience working in or alongside highly regulated environments, with direct exposure to security, compliance, or governance constraints

Nice To Haves

• Experience evaluating or benchmarking AI models and systems against defined success criteria
• Background in financial services
• Familiarity with enterprise integration patterns, data platforms, or platform engineering
• Public writing, presentations, or open-source contributions in the AI space

Responsibilities

• Manage and mentor a team of AI engineers across evaluation, prototyping, and tooling work
• Lead hands-on technical evaluations of frontier AI capabilities, including agentic systems, multimodal models, reasoning systems, and AI development tooling
• Build working prototypes that test capabilities against real business scenarios and enterprise constraints, including security, data governance, and integration requirements
• Establish and maintain sandbox environments for rapid evaluation, validated with risk and security, activated on demand
• Build and operate the tooling that supports the evaluation pipeline: intake, triage, design, execution, and results review
• Partner with liaisons in security, architecture, and risk to embed enterprise constraints into evaluation design from the start, not as an afterthought
• Translate technical findings into clear, evidence-backed recommendations that business-line leaders can act on
• Represent the engineering perspective in Radar publications, field work sessions, and executive briefings
• Ensure evaluations are reproducible: methodology, test scenarios, data, and results documented to a standard that a peer could independently assess

Benefits

• bonuses
• flexible benefits
• competitive compensation
• commissions
• stock where applicable
• Leaders who support your development through coaching and managing opportunities
• A world-class training program in financial services

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed