Why Join Thrivent?

Thrivent, a mission-driven Fortune 500 financial services organization, empowers people to thrive financially, emotionally, and socially. As a leader in the financial industry, we are at the forefront of innovation, leveraging cutting-edge AI technologies to deliver personalized financial advice, enhance customer experiences, and drive business growth. Joining Thrivent means becoming part of a collaborative culture that values integrity, innovation, and impact. Our AI Engineering Manager role offers the chance to lead transformative projects in agentic AI, LLMs, RAG systems, and classical ML, all while working on secure, compliant platforms across AWS and Azure. With competitive compensation, comprehensive benefits, and opportunities for professional growth, Thrivent is the ideal place for AI leaders passionate about financial services innovation.

Role Description

Thrivent is seeking an experienced AI Engineering Manager to lead a high-performing team building scalable, secure, and compliant production AI systems. You will combine deep technical leadership with strategic oversight to drive agentic AI, LLM/RAG, and classical ML initiatives from ideation through production and operations across AWS and Azure. Success looks like resilient platforms, measurable business outcomes, and a healthy engineering culture.

You’ll do this by:

• Leading and mentoring a team to deliver solutions spanning model development, agentic system design, and AI integration—ensuring observability, security, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Providing expertise in AI governance & Responsible AI aligned to financial-services expectations (e.g., NIST AI RMF, model risk management, GLBA privacy).
• Establishing operating policies, engineering standards, and SDLC/ML lifecycle practices that scale across teams.
• Translating company-wide objectives into budgets, roadmaps, OKRs, and measurable outcomes.
• Partnering with senior business and technology stakeholders to shape strategy, unblock delivery, and ensure compliance.
• Leading briefings and technical reviews that support IT objectives and executive decision-making.

Detailed Responsibilities

Designing Solutions

• Guide end-to-end architecture for AI systems (data → features → models → serving → monitoring), spanning AWS & Azure; review ADRs and ensure threat modeling, data lineage, and cost/perf trade-offs are explicit.
• Land decisions on RAG patterns, agent orchestration, vector indexing, prompt management, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop controls for regulated use cases.
• Sponsor reference architectures (Bedrock vs. SageMaker vs. EKS; Azure OpenAI vs. Azure ML vs. K8) and promote reuse via templates and golden paths.

Developing & Operating Production Systems

• Oversee deployment of scalable AI pipelines using Kubernetes, serverless, and managed services; optimize for latency, throughput, and cost at scale.
• Implement robust observability (tracing, metrics, logging) with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and LangChain eval frameworks.
• Drive security practices including encryption, access controls, vulnerability scanning, and compliance audits for financial data.

Team Leadership & Strategy

• Mentor engineers on best practices in MLOps, LLMOps, and agentic AI development.
• Collaborate with product, data science, and compliance teams to align AI initiatives with business goals.
• Manage budgets, vendor evaluations (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks), and tech stack decisions.

Required Skills

Thrivent seeks candidates with proven expertise in AI engineering leadership. Key skills include deep knowledge of LLMs, RAG architectures, agentic systems, AWS/Azure cloud platforms, MLOps, Responsible AI frameworks, Kubernetes orchestration, and financial services compliance.

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or related field; PhD preferred.
• 8+ years in software/AI engineering, with 3+ years managing engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience building production AI/ML systems in regulated industries like finance or healthcare.
• Proven track record leading AI transformations with measurable ROI.

Compensation Overview

Competitive base salary plus performance bonuses, equity, and comprehensive benefits package tailored to your experience and location.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) with generous company match.
• Paid time off, parental leave, and wellness programs.
• Professional development stipend and tuition reimbursement.
• Hybrid work model with flexibility.
• Mission-driven culture with volunteer opportunities.

Thrivent is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Apply today to shape the future of AI at Thrivent!