Head of AI

Ninth Wave Inc.

Head of AI

Location: New York NY

5 days in the office

Role Overview

The Head of AI is a senior cross-functional leader and hands-on technical leader responsible for defining and executing Ninth Waves AI vision roadmap and delivery across the platform. This role combines deep individual contribution with executive-level leadership ensuring AI initiatives are designed built and deployed to drive measurable business impact while meeting the highest standards of security compliance and responsible AI. This role will report to Chief Product Officer.

This role will partner closely with Engineering Product Operations Security and Go-To-Market teams to deliver production-grade AI capabilities to enhance internal workflows power customer-facing features and strengthen Ninth Waves competitive position in regulated financial services.

This is a hands-on senior role that is expected to remain deeply technical and to directly contribute to architecture prototyping design reviews and critical implementation decisions.

Responsibilities

Strategy & Leadership

• Define and own Ninth Waves company-wide AI strategy and long-term roadmap aligned with business objectives and regulatory requirements
• Establish and lead the AI Center of Excellence as an enablement and governance function that accelerates safe scalable AI adoption
• Identify and prioritize high-impact AI initiatives across product platform and operations.
• Communicate AI strategy progress and insights to executives clients partners and investors.

Hands-On Technical Leadership

• Serve as a principal individual contributor for AI architecture and system design across the platform
• Architect prototype and guide development of AI/ML systems including LLM-based applications RAG pipelines agent frameworks and ML workflows
• Evaluate select and integrate enterprise-grade AI tools models and platforms aligned with Ninth Waves security and compliance standards
• Lead rapid experimentation and prototyping to validate new AI-driven capabilities and de-risk production deployment
• Define and implement foundations for scalable AI delivery including model evaluation monitoring observability and lifecycle management
• Conduct deep technical reviews and hands-on problem solving during critical design performance and reliability phases

Compliance Security & Responsible AI

• Define and enforce responsible AI practices including bias detection privacy protection transparency explainability and auditability
• Partner closely with Security Risk and Compliance teams to ensure adherence to financial and regulatory frameworks (FFIEC OCC GLBA and related standards)
• Oversee the development and governance of clean reliable and AI-ready datasets within Ninth Waves data architecture

Internal Enablement & Product Collaboration

• Drive adoption of AI tools across the organization to improve productivity and effectiveness (engineering acceleration customer support sales enablement risk analytics and operations)
• Design and deliver internal training and enablement programs focused on AI capabilities emerging technologies and responsible usage
• Collaborate with Product and Go-To-Market teams to translate AI capabilities into differentiated offerings compelling client value propositions and revenue impact

Team Building & Culture

• Build mentor and lead a high-performing AI organization including ML engineers data scientists and applied AI practitioners
• Foster a culture of technical excellence hands-on ownership secure-by-design thinking and continuous learning

What Success Looks Like

• Production-grade AI capabilities delivering measurable impact on product differentiation operational efficiency and customer value
• Trusted regulator-aligned AI governance embedded across the organization
• AI systems that are observable auditable reliable and scalable
• A strong AI team operating with clear technical direction and business alignment

Requirements

• 10 years of experience across data science machine learning AI engineering or applied AI roles including 3 years in senior leadership or executive capacity
• Proven track record hands-on building and deploying AI/ML systems in production environments
• Deep expertise in modern AI/ML approaches including LLMs multimodal models vector databases ML pipelines and distributed systems
• Experience operating in regulated environments (fintech banking financial services or enterprise SaaS)
• Strong understanding of data privacy security architecture and responsible AI frameworks
• Ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear business and customer value
• Exceptional communication influence and cross-functional leadership skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with API-driven platforms data connectivity products or financial technology ecosystems
• Hands-on familiarity with RAG architectures agentic workflows and enterprise AI infrastructure
• Experience designing and delivering organizational AI enablement or training program

Company Overview

Ninth Wave is a permission-based SaaS platform that delivers secure data connectivity to financial institutions offering configurable controls visibility and insights into all connections between aggregators third-party apps and internal applications. Ninth Wave empowers financial institutions enabling secure data exchange in a holistic and scalable open finance ecosystem.

Required Experience:

Director