Principal, Artificial Intelligence Engineering

OCC • Chicago, IL

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

OCC is the world's largest equity derivatives clearing organization—the infrastructure that settles every U.S. options trade. We've recently formed a dedicated AI Research & Engineering team, and we're looking for a Principal AI Engineer to serve as its technical anchor. This is a senior individual contributor role by design. You won't manage people; you'll do the work, set the technical standard, and lead through expertise. You'll be the primary driver of OCC's agentic AI capabilities, architecting and building the systems that connect AI agents to real enterprise workflows in one of the most consequential and carefully regulated environments in financial markets. You'll shape OCC's AI roadmap alongside the Executive Director of AI Engineering, mentor junior engineers, and have time for experimentation with frontier tools. Our team works directly with AWS and Anthropic, accessing Claude models through both. If you're a seasoned engineer who wants to stay hands-on, lead through technical excellence, and build agentic AI systems that matter this role was written for you.

Requirements

• Experience mentoring and elevating junior engineers
• Expert-level Python; proficient in SQL
• Deep system design expertise: distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, APIs, and MCP servers
• Hands-on experience with data engineering: pipelines, transformation, and data modeling
• AWS experience; comfort with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines
• Strong production AI/LLM experience, or demonstrated hands-on passion for the space with the engineering depth to ramp quickly
• Strong working knowledge of AI risk vectors: hallucinations, prompt injection, bias, data privacy, and output validation
• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or a related technical field
• 10+ years of software engineering and systems architecture experience, with demonstrated technical leadership
• 5+ years as a senior individual contributor on complex, high-stakes production systems

Nice To Haves

• Exceptional ability to explain complex technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders
• Background in financial market infrastructure, derivatives, or similarly regulated industries
• Production experience building and operating LLM-powered applications
• Experience designing and operating agentic AI systems in enterprise environments
• Experience with context engineering strategies including RAG, prompt architecture, and retrieval pipeline design
• Familiarity with frontier models including Claude, GPT, and Gemini, and hands-on experimentation with emerging tools
• Hands-on experience with Anthropic's tooling and APIs, including the Claude API, Claude.ai, or the Anthropic Console
• Experience connecting AI agents to enterprise systems and workflows
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform)

Responsibilities

• Partner with the Executive Director of AI Engineering to define and execute OCC's AI technical roadmap, translating organizational priorities into concrete architectural decisions
• Lead OCC's agentic AI efforts: architect, build, and operate systems that connect AI agents to internal systems, data pipelines, and business workflows
• Leverage OCC's direct relationships with AWS and Anthropic to evaluate and adopt new model capabilities and tooling as they become available
• Build and ship production AI applications on AWS using Claude and related Anthropic tooling, maintaining high standards for reliability, security, and auditability
• Architect scalable systems that integrate LLMs and AI agents into OCC's internal systems, operational workflows, and business processes, owning decisions from design through production deployment
• Serve as the primary technical mentor for junior engineers: conducting code and architecture reviews, modeling engineering best practices, and raising the team's overall technical level (no direct reports)
• Define and enforce AI safety standards appropriate for a regulated SIFMU environment, including hallucination detection, output validation, bias assessment, and audit trails that satisfy SEC and CFTC oversight expectations
• Establish responsible AI practices and safety guardrails for LLM applications operating on sensitive financial data
• Navigate OCC's change management and security review processes when deploying AI systems into production
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and provide concrete, risk-aware recommendations on adoption

Benefits

• A highly collaborative and supportive environment developed to encourage work-life balance and employee wellness.
• A hybrid work environment, up to 2 days per week of remote work
• Tuition Reimbursement to support your continued education
• Student Loan Repayment Assistance
• Technology Stipend allowing you to use the device of your choice to connect to our network while working remotely
• Generous PTO and Parental leave
• 401k Employer Match
• Competitive health benefits including medical, dental and vision

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees