Vice President - AI Safety Platform Engineering

Role Overview 

We are seeking a Vice President – AI Safety Platforms to build and lead our enterprise AI safety engineering initiatives. As generative AI in financial services evolves from simple prompt-response workflows to autonomous agentic systems that execute multi-step plans, call APIs, and interact directly with internal systems, establishing robust safety mechanisms and standardized evaluation protocols is essential. 

In this role, you will recruit and lead dedicated engineering pods focused on developing a unified company-wide agentic evaluation framework, real-time LLM guardrail services, and automated governance controls. As the senior technical authority for AI safety, you will collaborate closely with core AI platform teams, risk control functions, and business units to drive necessary enhancements to the core AI platform (such as telemetry hooks, API capabilities, execution sandboxes, and data logging infrastructure) to ensure all enterprise AI deployments operate safely, verifiably, and in compliance with institutional standards. 

Key Responsibilities 

1. Unified Agentic Evaluation Framework 

• Company-Wide Architecture: Design, build, and deploy a single, company-wide agentic evaluation framework that standardizes how teams across all business lines benchmark, test, and measure AI agent performance prior to production deployment. 
• Trajectory & Multi-Step Reasoning Assessment: Implement evaluation methodologies that score autonomous planning quality, tool-calling precision, multi-turn state retention, trajectory efficiency, and error-recovery behaviors. 
• Continuous Monitoring & Production Drift: Integrate automated evaluation pipelines into runtime environments to continuously audit agent execution traces, detecting reasoning drift, tool failure modes, and unexpected trajectory shifts in production. 
• Domain-Specific Benchmarking: Establish standardized test suites and synthetic evaluation benchmarks tailored to complex financial workflows, such as automated research, risk assessment, and operational task execution. 

2. LLM Guardrails Infrastructure & Real-Time Controls 

• Low-Latency Guardrail Engine: Architect and scale enterprise guardrail microservices that inspect prompt inputs, retrieved context, and model outputs in real time to prevent data leakage, policy violations, and unvalidated execution. 
• Tool-Use & Action Control: Implement runtime policy gateways that inspect and authorize tool calls before execution, ensuring agents operate within authorized data boundaries and action scopes. 
• Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) Triggers: Build configurable escalation workflows and approval gates that automatically pause execution for high-risk operations (e.g., money movement, client record modifications, or external communications) until human authorization is granted. 

3. Core AI Platform Enhancements & Governance Integration 

• Drive Platform Enhancements: Partner directly with the core AI Platform team to drive the implementation of safety APIs, telemetry hooks, developer SDKs, and MLOps/LLMOps pipeline integrations. 
• Auditability & Execution Telemetry: Define and enforce technical standards for immutable audit logging, execution tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry standards), and principal identity propagation across all agentic workflows. 
• Regulatory & Model Risk Alignment: Translate model risk management standards (e.g., SR 11-7 / SR 26-2 guidance, FINRA supervision requirements) into automated engineering safeguards and policy checks. 

4. Engineering Leadership & Strategic Oversight 

• Team Building & Mentorship: Hire, develop, and mentor high-performing engineering teams specializing in applied machine learning, AI safety, and enterprise platform engineering. 
• Strategic Roadmap: Own the technical roadmap for enterprise AI safety infrastructure, setting clear milestones for evaluation framework adoption, runtime latency optimization, and governance automation. 
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Articulate technical risk profiles, evaluation metrics, and safety architecture to risk committees, model validation teams, and executive leadership. 

Key Qualifications 

Basic Qualifications 

• Role Level: Vice President experience (or equivalent senior engineering leadership) in financial services or large-scale enterprise software environments. 
• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Systems Engineering, or a related quantitative field. 
• Engineering Leadership: 4+ years leading applied ML or software engineering teams in building platform infrastructure or microservices. 
• Software Engineering Depth: 8+ years of hands-on software development experience (Python, Go, Java, or C++) building microservices, high-throughput APIs, or enterprise platform services. 
• AI & Agentic Expertise: Technical fluency with Large Language Models (LLMs), RAG systems, function calling / tool integration, and agentic execution paradigms (e.g., LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI, MCP server architectures). 

Preferred Experience & Technical Skills 

• Agentic Evaluation: Direct experience building agent evaluation frameworks and metrics (e.g., LLM-as-a-Judge, G-Eval, trajectory trace evaluation, task completion scoring). 
• Guardrail Frameworks: Hands-on experience integrating low-latency guardrail tools and runtime filters (e.g., NeMo Guardrails, Guardrails AI, Llama Guard). 
• AI Observability & Tracing: Experience with LLM and agent tracing tools (e.g., LangSmith, OpenTelemetry, Phoenix, MLflow) and structured audit logging infrastructure. 
• Platform Engineering Alignment: Proven ability to partner across teams and drive key governance capabilities into core shared platforms. 

We Offer Best-In-Class Benefits

Healthcare & Medical Insurance

We offer a wide range of health and welfare programs that vary depending on office location. These generally include medical, dental, short-term disability, long-term disability, life, accidental death, labor accident and business travel accident insurance.

Holiday & Vacation Policies

We offer competitive vacation policies based on employee level and office location. We promote time off from work to recharge by providing generous vacation entitlements and a minimum of three weeks expected vacation usage each year.

Financial Wellness & Retirement

We assist employees in saving and planning for retirement, offer financial support for higher education, and provide a number of benefits to help employees prepare for the unexpected. We offer live financial education and content on a variety of topics to address the spectrum of employees’ priorities.

Health Services

We offer a medical advocacy service for employees and family members facing critical health situations, and counseling and referral services through the Employee Assistance Program (EAP). We provide Global Medical, Security and Travel Assistance and a Workplace Ergonomics Program. We also offer state-of-the-art on-site health centers in certain offices.

Fitness

To encourage employees to live a healthy and active lifestyle, some of our offices feature on-site fitness centers. For eligible employees we typically reimburse fees paid for a fitness club membership or activity (up to a pre-approved amount).

Child Care & Family Care

We offer on-site child care centers that provide full-time and emergency back-up care, as well as mother and baby rooms and homework rooms. In every office, we provide advice and counseling services, expectant parent resources and transitional programs for parents returning from parental leave. Adoption, surrogacy, egg donation and egg retrieval stipends are also available.

Benefits at Goldman Sachs

Read more about the full suite of class-leading benefits our firm has to offer.