Executive Director AI Engineering

Your Team Responsibilities

We are seeking an Executive Director of AI Engineering to lead the architecture, development, and scaling of MSCI's AI platforms and capabilities across the MSCI business units. This role combines deep technical ownership of Generative AI systems in production with strategic leadership.

• Build and lead a high-performing AI engineering team focused on scalable platform development and production-grade AI infrastructure.
• Collaborate with research scientists, product managers, and business leaders to translate business problems into structured engineering solutions.
• Partner with data, cloud, and security teams to design architectures for data pipelines, model serving, and multi-agent orchestration.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, responsible AI, continuous learning, and shared accountability across all teams.
• Act as a visible transformation leader, champion AI adoption, build trust, and drive engagement across all levels of the organization.
• Contribute to MSCI's overall AI strategy, ensuring alignment with product vision, compliance requirements, and business growth priorities

Your Key Responsibilities

• Architect and deliver MSCI's AI platform using LLMs, semantic search, Agentic AI, and multi-agent orchestration.
• Own the end-to-end engineering lifecycle, from data ingestion and processing to model serving and inference on a cloud-native stack (GCP, Azure).
• Lead evaluation, integration, and optimization of large language models and open-source AI frameworks for production workloads.
• Design systems for user and machine interactions with a focus on performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Build continuous learning and feedback loops using real-world data to improve model quality and reliability.
• Establish engineering standards, experimentation frameworks, and CI/CD pipelines for Gen AI services.
• Drive innovation in areas such as adaptive personas, context memory, trust and safety filters, and agentic workflows.
• Translate MSCI's enterprise AI strategy into a clear engineering roadmap with priorities, milestones, and success metrics.
• Partner with the AI Governance and IT teams to ensure alignment with enterprise governance, delivery standards, and compliance requirements.
• Manage vendor relationships, platform partnerships, and cloud cost optimization for large-scale AI workloads.

Your skills and experience that will help you excel

• 18+ years of software or AI engineering or data science experience, including leadership of large-scale AI systems in production.
• Proven track record deploying and optimizing Gen AI solutions, multi-agent architectures, and RAG-based systems.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native AI infrastructure (Azure, GCP) and distributed inference pipelines.
• Strong foundation in AI and data engineering, MLOps, model evaluation, and system observability.
• Experience in financial data, market data, or information services is a strong plus.
• Demonstrated success building and mentoring diverse engineering teams.
• Executive-level communication skills, ability to influence across engineering, product, and business leadership.
• Highly structured, outcome-driven, and comfortable operating in ambiguity.
• Strong technical curiosity with the ability to challenge design decisions constructively.
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related discipline preferred.

About MSCI

What we offer you

• Transparent compensation schemes and comprehensive employee benefits, tailored to your location, ensuring your financial security, health, and overall wellbeing.

• Flexible working arrangements, advanced technology, and collaborative workspaces.

• A culture of high performance and innovation where we experiment with new ideas and take responsibility for achieving results.

• A global network of talented colleagues, who inspire, support, and share their expertise to innovate and deliver for our clients.

• Global Orientation program to kickstart your journey, followed by access to our Learning@MSCI platform, AI Learning Center , LinkedIn Learning Pro and tailored learning opportunities for ongoing skills development.

• Multi-directional career paths that offer professional growth and development through new challenges, internal mobility and expanded roles.

• We actively nurture an environment that builds a sense of inclusion belonging and connection, including eight Employee Resource Groups. All Abilities, Asian Support Network, Black Leadership Network, Climate Action Network, Hola! MSCI, Pride & Allies, Women in Tech, and Women’s Leadership Forum.

At MSCI we are passionate about what we do, and we are inspired by our vision – to power better decisions. You’ll be part of an industry-leading network of creative, curious, and entrepreneurial pioneers. This is a space where you can challenge yourself, set new standards and perform beyond expectations for yourself, our clients, and our industry.

MSCI strengthens global markets by connecting participants across the financial ecosystem with a common language. Our research-based data, analytics and indexes, supported by advanced technology, set standards for global investors and help our clients understand risks and opportunities so they can make better decisions and unlock innovation. We serve asset managers and owners, private-market sponsors and investors, hedge funds, wealth managers, banks, insurers and corporates.

MSCI Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. It is the policy of the firm to ensure equal employment opportunity without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, age, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, disability, marital and civil partnership/union status, pregnancy (including unlawful discrimination on the basis of a legally protected parental leave), veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. MSCI is also committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you are an individual with a disability and would like to request a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application process, please email Disability.Assistance@msci.com and indicate the specifics of the assistance needed. Please note, this e-mail is intended only for individuals who are requesting a reasonable workplace accommodation; it is not intended for other inquiries.

To all recruitment agencies

MSCI does not accept unsolicited CVs/Resumes. Please do not forward CVs/Resumes to any MSCI employee, location, or website. MSCI is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited CVs/Resumes.

Note on recruitment scams

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