Senior AI Forward Deployed Engineer

Position Summary

ECI is seeking a Senior AI Forward Deployed Engineer to help investment firms, including hedge funds, private equity firms, investment banks, and family offices, put AI to work in their businesses. This hands-on, client-facing engineering role identifies high-value opportunities across deal flow, research, trading, portfolio management, risk, valuations, and middle- and back-office operations, then builds, deploys, and drives adoption of production solutions.

The Senior AI Forward Deployed Engineer operates at the Senior FDE level, requiring 5 or more years of professional software engineering experience. The role independently leads client engagements from discovery and scoping through production deployment, adoption, documentation, and handover, and mentors Associate FDEs and FDEs.

This role will be hybrid in New York, with regular work at client sites in the New York area and occasional travel.

ECI Description

ECI is a Modern Intelligent Service Provider serving alternative investment and banking firms across the United States, United Kingdom, APAC, and India. ECI provides infrastructure, security, operations, and AI solutions within client environments. Through the ELLA platform and technology partnerships, ECI builds and operates practical AI solutions designed for measurable outcomes, secure data handling, and continuous improvement.

Responsibilities

• Independently lead AI client engagements from discovery and scoping through production deployment, adoption, documentation, and handover, serving as the accountable engineering lead for the client.
• Lead discovery with client leaders, operators, and technical teams to map workflows and identify where AI can save time, reduce risk, or improve quality across investment research, deal flow, trading, portfolio management, risk, valuations, fund operations, investor relations, and compliance.
• Own engagement scope and turn business needs into prioritized, buildable use cases with clear success measures based on value, data access, risk, and implementation effort.
• Architect, build, and deploy AI agents, integrations, and workflows using TypeScript or Python, ECI platforms, AI coding tools, Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft 365, and appropriate specialist products.
• Integrate solutions with client systems, APIs, documents, and data while addressing authentication, permissions, data isolation, audit trails, records retention, retries, and partial failures.
• Design evaluations using client examples, verify AI-assisted code and outputs, and apply automated checks and human review before solutions reach production.
• Partner with client compliance, security, and IT teams to establish data-handling requirements, approvals, information barriers, and production controls.
• Lead client enablement, train users, measure adoption and results against agreed success measures, iterate based on feedback, and document operating procedures and runbooks for handover.
• Mentor Associate FDEs and FDEs through technical reviews, client delivery, and professional development; convert recurring client needs into reusable patterns, connectors, and agent skills, and share field insights with ECI product and engineering teams.

Qualifications (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities)

• Five or more years of professional software engineering experience, including experience supporting production systems.
• Hands-on experience building and shipping LLM-powered features, agents, or AI-enabled workflows to production users.
• Strong programming skills in TypeScript or Python, including development of APIs, integrations, and data workflows.
• Experience with retrieval, evaluation, and guardrails for LLM applications, including work across more than one model provider.
• Experience integrating third-party systems and APIs and handling authentication, permissions, data access, and failure conditions.
• Experience using AI coding agents with the judgment to review, correct, test, and verify generated output.
• Ability to understand business processes quickly, communicate technical choices clearly to non-technical stakeholders, and lead client engagements independently and communicate effectively with executive, business, compliance, security, and technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a client-facing engineering role and exposure to hedge funds, private equity, investment banking, asset management, fund administration, or other regulated financial-services environments.
• Experience with Azure, Azure AI Foundry, infrastructure as code such as Terraform, and Microsoft 365 technologies including Entra ID, Microsoft Graph, Teams, and SharePoint.
• Familiarity with investment-industry systems, data, and workflows, including portfolio or order management, fund accounting, research management, market data, private-markets platforms, compliance archiving, reconciliation, or investor reporting.

Working Conditions

• Ability to lead client engagements independently while coordinating effectively with distributed ECI product, engineering, industry, security, and account teams.
• Ability to work regularly at client sites in the New York area and travel occasionally for business.
• Ability to manage multiple client priorities and respond flexibly to deadlines, production issues, and changing engagement needs.
• Ability to work beyond normal business hours when necessary to support client delivery, releases, or critical business cycles.
• Ability to operate a computer keyboard, mouse, and other standard office technology for extended periods.
• Client onboarding may require background checks, security attestations, personal-trading pre-clearance, holdings reporting, or other controls required by the client.

ECI’s culture is all about connection - connection with our clients, our technology and most importantly with each other. In addition to working with an amazing team around the world, ECI also offers a competitive compensation package and the base salary range for this role is $175,000-$215,000, plus flexible PTO, health benefit eligibility the first of the month, life insurance, pet insurance, 401K and so much more! If you believe you’d be a great fit and are ready for your best job ever, we’d like to hear from you!!

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ECI is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration consistent with applicable law.