Senior Director - AI Engineering/ Applied AI

FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a leading global analytics software company, helping businesses in 100+ countries make better decisions. Join our world-class team today and fulfill your career potential!

The Opportunity

As Senior Director of AI Engineering, you will lead innovation and strategic growth across FICO's platform. Working at the forefront of our Generative AI efforts, you'll drive the application of large language models and cutting-edge AI technologies to enhance fraud detection, streamline decision authoring, automate customer communication workflows, and optimize overall performance. You will set the technical vision for our AI systems, ensuring they are robust, scalable, and responsibly governed. Most importantly, you'll lead a high-performing engineering team to deliver transformative AI solutions that address real business challenges and advance FICO's platform capabilities.

What You'll Contribute

• Lead, develop, and coach a high-performing engineering team by fostering a culture of aligned autonomy, clear communication, and continuous learning — while actively recruiting top talent and setting clear direction for hiring strategies.

• Drive the design and implementation of AI solutions — including LLM-powered decision automation, fraud detection, and process optimization — to strengthen FICO's position as a market leader.

• Partner with stakeholders and product managers to understand business priorities and translate them into actionable engineering roadmaps that harness advanced AI capabilities for meaningful outcomes.

• Define best practices for model evaluation, governance, and monitoring to ensure AI systems remain accurate, reliable, secure, and compliant at scale.

• Build and maintain systems for continuous model monitoring, A/B testing, backtesting, and drift detection to keep deployed models performing at their best over time.

• Collaborate closely with UX designers, product teams, and engineering leaders to align AI capabilities across the platform and deliver a cohesive user experience.

What We're Seeking

• Proven experience building and leading engineering teams to deliver advanced AI solutions, with deep expertise in Large Language Models and their application to decision automation, fraud detection, and process optimization.

• 15+ years of industry experience in software, machine learning, or data engineering, with a demonstrated history of leading complex, large-scale projects and applying LLMs to solve real-world challenges.

• A track record of effective leadership, coaching, and mentoring that fosters innovation, accountability, and a high-performance culture in dynamic, fast-paced environments.

• Hands-on experience with model fine-tuning, in-context learning, and custom evaluation frameworks, alongside a strong command of backtesting, A/B testing, and drift detection methodologies to ensure reliable model performance in production.

• Solid understanding of model monitoring, governance, and compliance practices, with a commitment to responsible AI and the ability to architect scalable, secure, AI and data-driven systems that meet rigorous production standards.

• Familiarity with compliance and regulatory requirements in AI-driven decisioning environments, and a working knowledge of modern software engineering practices and design patterns.

• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to work across departments and align engineering efforts to broader business goals.

• Thought leadership in AI and machine learning — through publications, patents, or open-source contributions — is a plus.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, AI, or a related field.

Our Offer to You

• An inclusive culture strongly reflecting our core values:  Act Like an Owner, Delight Our Customers and Earn the Respect of Others.

• The opportunity to make an impact and develop professionally by leveraging your unique strengths and participating in valuable learning experiences.

• Highly competitive compensation, benefits and rewards programs that encourage you to bring your best every day and be recognized for doing so.

• An engaging, people-first work environment offering work/life balance, employee resource groups, and social events to promote interaction and camaraderie.

• The targeted base pay range for this role is: $192,500 to $302,500 with this range reflecting differences in candidate knowledge, skills and experience.
   

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Why Make a Move to FICO?

At FICO, you can develop your career with a leading organization in one of the fastest-growing fields in technology today – Big Data analytics.  You’ll play a part in our commitment to help businesses use data to improve every choice they make, using advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, optimization, and much more.

FICO makes a real difference in the way businesses operate worldwide:

•    Credit Scoring — FICO® Scores are used by 90 of the top 100 US lenders.

•    Fraud Detection and Security — 4 billion payment cards globally are protected by FICO fraud systems.

•    Lending — 3/4 of US mortgages are approved using the FICO Score.

Global trends toward digital transformation have created tremendous demand for FICO’s solutions, placing us among the world’s top 100 software companies by revenue. We help many of the world’s largest banks, insurers, retailers, telecommunications providers and other firms reach a new level of success. Our success is dependent on really talented people – just like you – who thrive on the collaboration and innovation that’s nurtured by a diverse and inclusive environment. We’ll provide the support you need, while ensuring you have the freedom to develop your skills and grow your career.  Join FICO and help change the way business thinks!

Learn more about how you can fulfil your potential at www.fico.com/Careers

FICO promotes a culture of inclusion and seeks to attract a diverse set of candidates for each job opportunity. We are an equal employment opportunity employer and we’re proud to offer employment and advancement opportunities to all candidates without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, pregnancy, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. Research has shown that women and candidates from underrepresented communities may not apply for an opportunity if they don’t meet all stated qualifications. While our qualifications are clearly related to role success, each candidate’s profile is unique and strengths in certain skill and/or experience areas can be equally effective. If you believe you have many, but not necessarily all, of the stated qualifications we encourage you to apply.

Information submitted with your application is subject to the FICO Privacy policy at https://www.fico.com/en/privacy-policy