Associate Director, Full Stack-AI

Job title: Associate Director, Full Stack-AI

About the Role Join Fitch Group as an Associate Director, Full Stack-AI based in Chicago. You will lead AI-enabled, enterprise-scale applications within the External Application Development Chapter, delivering cloud-native solutions that span data ingestion pipelines, microservices, data visualizations, and customer-facing web products.

What You'll Do

• Demonstrate technical expertise in full-stack technologies and AI-enabled solutions for enterprise-scale applications.
• Design and implement modern AI/ML solutions, including generative AI/LLM-based applications, translating concepts into code artifacts and integrating API/data layers.
• Contribute to GenAI applications using LangChain and LangGraph, including agent workflows, memory/state handling, and graph-based orchestration.
• Work as part of an agile team across design, development, debugging, and deployment while addressing security, cross-browser, and cross-platform considerations.
• Collaborate with Product Owners and stakeholders to understand business needs and define/develop applications/architecture; review, implement, and optimize engineering processes.
• Build domain knowledge and own data quality for allocated areas; maintain and enhance microservices-based components.
• Develop and promote development best practices and guidelines across various applications.
• Write automated unit, integration, performance, and visual regression tests; integrate test execution with CI/CD for DevSecOps alignment.
• Promote, implement, and evolve development practices around commits, versioning, and dependency management.

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with strong backend development expertise in Java and Python; hands-on experience building scalable backend services with Spring Boot, FastAPI, or similar.
• 7+ years designing and developing distributed architectures in cloud-native environments; experience with microservices.
• 5+ years building scalable web applications using modern frontend frameworks such as React and TypeScript.
• Proven experience building and supporting microservices-based architectures; hands-on AI/ML production experience; strong knowledge of generative AI concepts (embeddings, vector stores, RAG, LLM integration).
• Experience building GenAI applications using LangChain, LangGraph, and leading LLM providers or open-source models.
• Experience with relational databases (Oracle/PostgreSQL) and familiarity with NoSQL/search technologies (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, Solr).
• Expertise in modern package management and test frameworks (NPM, Yarn, Webpack, Jest, Enzyme, Karma, Jasmine, Mocha, Wraith), CI/CD pipelines with Git and DevSecOps practices including automation and secure delivery.
• Experience working in Agile teams; strong communication and collaboration skills.

Nice to Have

• Experience building AI-enabled features for customer-facing enterprise applications.
• AWS services exposure (EC2, S3, Route 53, CloudFront, CloudFormation) and networking concepts (VPCs, subnets, security groups).
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with data engineering and modern data architecture patterns.
• Observability, monitoring, and production support for distributed systems.
• Familiarity with Atlassian tools (JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo).
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical standards across teams.
• Exposure to business intelligence or data visualization tools.

Compensation & Benefits

• What We Offer: Innovative Technological Environment with a modern, cloud-based, containerized, serverless, and microservices-oriented tech stack.
• High Impact and Visibility: opportunities to lead data engineering and API initiatives that directly impact customer-facing products.
• Professional Growth and Development: mentorship and continuous learning to expand skills and expertise in emerging technologies.
• Supportive and Collaborative Culture: a collaborative, agile environment where ideas are shared and challenges overcome as a team.