VP Technology, Agentic AI

Raymond James • Saint Petersburg, FL

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

This position is essential to bridge innovation with disciplined engineering—delivering agentic systems that are reliable, observable, compliant, and cost-efficient, and that materially enhance advisor and client experience. This position follows our hybrid workstyle policy: Expected to be in a Raymond James office location a minimum of 10-12 days a month. Please note: This role is not eligible for Work Visa sponsorship, either currently or in the future.

Requirements

• Leadership of High-Performing Technical Teams
• Proven ability to recruit, develop, and lead elite engineering, AI/ML, and platform teams with deep expertise in agentic systems, orchestration, and cloud-native architectures.
• Establishes a culture of precision, accountability, and high reliability—balancing innovation with disciplined engineering suitable for regulated financial environments.
• Creates clear technical strategy, operating models, reference architectures, and quality gates that scale across teams and programs.
• Demonstrated success driving organizations that excel at both deep technical R&D and production excellence (observability, reliability, resilience, scalability).
• Strong communicator capable of translating complex system behaviors into clear decisions, tradeoffs, and roadmaps for senior leadership.
• Agentic AI (Expert-Level)
• Deep mastery of agentic AI architectures, reasoning loops, decision graphs, planning/critique patterns, and autonomous execution models.
• Expert in context engineering, including hierarchical context flows, dynamic context construction, scoped memory, retrieval strategies, and minimizing cognitive overload.
• Advanced capability designing orchestration patterns such as multi-agent collaboration, hierarchical agents, planning-directed tool use, and hybrid autonomous workflows.
• Strong command of memory strategies including short-term (scratchpads, ephemeral state, execution frames) and long-term (vector stores, episodic memory, structured knowledge graphs).
• Expertise in resiliency engineering for agentic systems, including fallback paths, redundancy, guardrails, validation layers, cross-agent voting, circuit breakers, and deterministic replay.
• Hands-on experience with major agentic frameworks and realistic understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.
• AWS Expertise designing scalable, resilient, and secure agentic systems on AWS.
• Proficiency across compute (ECS, EKS, Lambda, EC2), data services (DynamoDB, Aurora, S3, OpenSearch), and orchestration technologies (Step Functions, EventBridge, SQS, SNS).
• Advanced experience with AI/ML services: Bedrock (Claude, Llama, Titan), SageMaker, Kendra, and hybrid retrieval architectures.
• Strong grounding in IAM, VPC architecture, security controls, encryption (KMS), Secrets Manager, and WAF.
• Mastery of observability: CloudWatch, X-Ray, structured logs, distributed tracing, performance tuning, autoscaling, and cost optimization under Well-Architected principles.
• AI/ML & Software Engineering
• Deep understanding of LLM behavior, tool-use patterns, structured output, evaluation frameworks, and safety/guardrail systems.
• Proficiency in microservices, distributed systems, CI/CD automation, automated testing and canary/ring deployments.
• Demonstrated ability to drive teams to deliver highly reliable, scalable, and secure production AI systems with clear SLAs and operational metrics.
• Leadership & Execution
• Ability to define and execute the enterprise roadmap for agentic AI, including reference architectures, governance patterns, best practices, and capability maturity models.
• Skilled at leading organizations through R&D innovation cycles and production hardening cycles, ensuring prototypes evolve into durable enterprise services.
• Strong track record partnering across business and technology stakeholders to deliver measurable value through safe, compliant deployment of advanced AI capabilities.
• Bachelor’s: Computer and Information Science (Required)

Nice To Haves

• Experience designing AI systems aligned with regulatory, compliance, supervisory, and model-risk requirements in financial services.
• Bachelor’s: Data Science
• Bachelor’s: Information Technology

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level