Senior AI Engineer

At Jack Henry, we're more than a technology company — we're a force for good in financial services, redefining how community banks and credit unions connect with the people they serve. Our mission is rooted in people-inspired innovation, empowering financial institutions to deliver seamless, secure, and human-centered experiences. The AI Platform Team builds the platform that AI runs on at Jack Henry, including the Garage (our hosting platform for vibe-coded apps built by non-engineers across the company), the AI Gateway (routes and governs AI requests enterprise-wide), MCP servers connecting agents to core banking systems, and self-hosted inference. Most of it started as someone's proof of concept; this role makes it production-ready: reliable AI workflows with real validation, error handling, retries, logging, and fallback behavior; evals and automated testing for agentic systems that don't behave deterministically; monitoring that tells us quality has drifted before a user does. You'll work directly with the internal users who built those POCs, shaping them into software and workflows that hold up, partner with cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure experts, collaborate with AI coaches so others can use what we build, and mentor engineers earlier in their careers. You'll also use agentic workflows to do the work itself — we build with these tools, not just on top of them. Financial services adds a constraint most AI work doesn't have: everything we ship has to be observable, auditable, policy-bounded, and explainable.

Responsibilities

• Perform and lead system analysis and programming activities that take AI proofs of concept to production-ready software — including the research needed where no established pattern exists yet, and timely, quality delivery into production
• Perform, and may lead, technical/engineering support for new and existing applications from code delivery until the retirement of the application
• Develop, test and review applications based on business requirements and industry best practices
• Use best practices, standard guidance, and agentic development workflows to create and modify code
• Consider how code changes will affect end users and internal teams
• Review code created by less experienced team members
• Collaborate with quality and security partners — cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and AI governance — to ensure timely delivery of high-quality products
• Perform and may lead work with cross-team as projects dictate
• Work on and lead critical tasks and deliverables with no assistance, and set and update expectations on size, scope, and timelines
• Participate in and may lead team in cross-functional meetings and discussions
• Create required technical documentation
• Stay updated with emerging AI technologies and industry trends, recommending innovative solutions to improve software development processes
• Adhere to documented departmental and corporate standards
• Participate in the definition and documentation of standards — including what "production-ready" means for AI systems at Jack Henry
• Lead unit tests, integration tests, and evals to ensure the reliability, security, and performance of developed software, especially AI systems and workflows
• Debug and troubleshoot issues as they arise, providing timely resolutions — including failure modes specific to AI systems, like quality drift, prompt regressions, provider outages, and cost spikes
• May contribute to product architecture
• May perform other job duties as assigned

Requirements

• Minimum of 6 years of technical experience in software development
• Production ownership of AI systems (AI agents, AI features in products, MCP servers, etc.)
• Experience with a major cloud environment (GCP, AWS, or Azure)
• Experience with unit testing and end-to-end automated testing
• Experience with Kubernetes
• Comfort with ambiguity and shifting priorities
• Self-directed, willing to push through roadblocks rather than wait them out
• Ability to travel up to 5% to attend internal business meetings, training and/or professional conferences

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree
• Fintech experience
• Experience with GCP and infrastructure as code (Terraform)
• Experience in cloud security and DevOps
• Experience with model fine-tuning, evaluation (e.g. controlling for bias), and validation
• Experience with AI observability, evals, and model monitoring

Work Arrangement

This is a hybrid role requiring at least 1 day per week in any of the following office locations: Allen, TX; Louisville, KY; Birmingham, AL; Cedar Falls, IA; Charlotte, NC; Overland Park, KS; Monett, MO; or Springfield, MO. This position is ineligible for immigration sponsorship and support (H-1B, PERM, etc.).

Benefits

Jack Henry offers comprehensive benefits designed to support your physical, mental, and financial health so you can thrive both personally and professionally. Our culture is built on the motto: "Do the right thing, do whatever it takes, and have fun." We foster an environment where inclusion, sustainability, and community impact are more than values — they're how we operate. Associates consistently cite our exceptional culture as a primary reason they love working here: we do great things together, rise to challenges, seek new opportunities, and support one another through change. We're also leading the way in technology modernization, helping financial institutions evolve with speed, security, and flexibility through secure data access, fraud mitigation, and seamless integration.