Director, Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

BNY is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to join the Engineering Hub Team. This role is located in Pittsburgh, PA or New York City, NY. As a leading global financial services company, BNY influences nearly 20% of the world’s investible assets and is recognized as a top destination for innovators.

Responsibilities

• Lead a portfolio of Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) engagements across business and platform domains; set priorities, allocate engineering capacity, and ensure engagements are scoped to deliver measurable value within time-boxed windows.
• Serve as the senior technical voice in discovery with executive sponsors and business leaders; translate ambiguous, high-stakes opportunities into feasible, production-ready delivery plans.
• Own and evolve the FDE playbook: define discovery-to-production standards, engagement entry and exit criteria, handoff protocols, and working norms that govern how the team operates.
• Drive the reuse-first mandate across the FDE team: establish patterns for when to build, extend, or standardize; ensure field learnings are converted into firm-wide reference architectures and platform contributions.
• Set quality and governance standards for the FDE function: secure-by-default practices, observability, testability, and operational readiness expectations applied consistently across all engagements.
• Define the institutionalization model for forward deployment: ensure every engagement ends with a clear handoff, documented ownership, and a capable owning team—not a dependency on FDE.
• Represent the FDE function to architecture, control, security, compliance, and senior technology leadership; shape firm-wide AI and platform strategy based on production delivery evidence.
• Identify capability gaps and platform investment opportunities surfaced through FDE field work; translate these into actionable recommendations for platform and engineering leadership.
• Build and grow the FDE team: recruit, develop, and retain senior engineers; set a high technical bar and a culture of disciplined, evidence-backed delivery.
• Stay at the frontier of AI, platform engineering, and regulated delivery practices; bring that knowledge back into the function and the broader technology organization.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent work experience required; advanced degree is beneficial.
• 14+ years of software development and technical leadership experience, including direct accountability for production systems and cross-functional delivery programs; experience in the securities or financial services industry is a plus.
• Strong foundational understanding of modern AI and agentic application patterns, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), semantic search, and agent-based system design.
• Hands-on experience building backend services, APIs, and production systems.
• Experience working across architecture, data, and platform concerns rather than only within a narrow layer.

Preferred Qualifications

• Track record of building or scaling a delivery capability (e.g., solutions engineering, forward deployment, platform engineering) within a large enterprise or regulated environment.
• Demonstrated experience delivering AI, data, or workflow-heavy solutions at scale in regulated environments, with accountability for production outcomes.
• Strong systems-thinking and architecture judgment across services, data, and infrastructure; able to evaluate and influence technology choices at a divisional level.
• Experience defining and operating delivery standards, playbooks, or center-of-excellence functions.
• Experience balancing speed with governance, security, and operational rigor across a team or portfolio.
• Deep familiarity with reusable platform patterns, internal developer platforms, and productized infrastructure.

Skills

Technical Skills

• Strong software engineering skills in one or more of: Java, TypeScript/JavaScript, Python.
• Experience with APIs, service integration, and secure-by-default engineering practices.
• Ability to work across data, AI, workflow, and platform layers as needed.
• Comfort using modern AI tooling pragmatically without confusing prototypes for production systems.
• Familiarity with application frameworks and containerization.

Non-Technical Skills

• Exceptional written and verbal communication; able to advise and influence senior business and technology executives.
• Strong strategic and product judgment: knows which opportunities are worth pursuing and which are not.
• Proven ability to lead across matrixed organizations and build alignment without formal authority.
• Structured tradeoff thinking at portfolio scale, balancing risk, speed, and long-term platform health.
• Bias toward action with disciplined follow-through and strong artifact discipline.

People Leadership

• Leads, grows, and retains a team of senior engineers; sets technical standards and delivery culture for the FDE function.
• Develops talent pipelines and mentors engineers toward greater technical and delivery autonomy.
• Influences technology implementation and forward-deployed delivery standards across large IT divisions.

Benefits

BNY offers highly competitive compensation, benefits, and wellbeing programs rooted in a strong culture of excellence and a pay-for-performance philosophy. Benefits include:

• Access to flexible global resources and tools for your life’s journey.
• Focus on health, personal resilience, and financial goals.
• Generous paid leaves, including paid volunteer time.

Pay

The base salary for this position is expected to be between $147,000 and $255,000 per year at the commencement of employment. Base salary is determined on an individualized basis, including experience and market location, and is part of a total compensation package that may also include commission earnings, discretionary bonuses, short and long-term incentive packages, and Company-sponsored benefit programs.