Fitch Group is currently seeking an Associate Director, Full Stack-AI based out of our office in Chicago.

As an Associate Director on our External Application Development Chapter, you will have the opportunity to be a part of an exceptionally talented, agile team dedicated to delivering world-class solutions to Fitch customers. Our team focuses on building cutting-edge, cloud-native applications, comprising of data ingestion pipelines, microservices, data visualizations and customer-facing web products using modern front-end technologies

What We Offer:

1. Innovative Technological Environment:

Fitch Group offers a modern technology stack that is cloud-based, containerized, serverless, and microservices-oriented, providing a cutting-edge environment to work in. This is a great opportunity to work with the latest technologies and frameworks, driving innovation and modernization.

1. High Impact and Visibility:

This role provides the chance to lead and shape data engineering and API initiatives that directly impact Fitch's customer-facing products and associated backend systems. You will have high visibility within the organization, collaborating with product owners and stakeholders to drive strategic initiatives.

1. Professional Growth and Development:

Fitch Group emphasizes continuous learning and professional development. As the Director of Software Engineering, you will have the opportunity to mentor and grow a high-performance team while also expanding your own skills and expertise in emerging technologies.

1. Supportive and Collaborative Culture:

Fitch Group fosters a collaborative and agile work environment where team members are encouraged to share ideas and work together to overcome challenges. You will be part of a talented, bright, and driven team, making the work both rewarding and enjoyable.

We’ll Count on You To:

1. Demonstrate technical expertise in full-stack technologies, AI-enabled solutions for enterprise-scale applications and applications.
2. Demonstrate technical experience in design best practices, build modern AI/ML solutions, including generative AI/LLM-based applications aligned to business and product outcomes, providing effective translation to code artifacts, and implementing an appropriate integration approach for API/data layer.

1. Contribute to and guide the development of GenAI applications using frameworks such as LangChain and LangGraph, including agent workflows, memory/state handling, and graph-based orchestration.
2. Work as part of an agile team in design, development, debugging, and deployment efforts while addressing security, cross-browser, and cross-platform expectations and concerns.
3. Collaborate with Product Owners and stakeholders to understand business needs, define and develop applications/architecture, design, review, implement, and optimize Engineering processes.
4. Build data expertise and a deep understanding of business domain knowledge and own data quality for allocated areas of ownership.
5. Maintain and enhance microservices-based components for the application suite.
6. Recommend, create, and maintain development best practices and guidelines to be used across various applications.
7. Write automated unit, integration, performance, and visual regression test cases.
8. Integrate test case execution with the CI/CD pipeline to better align with the DevSecOps strategy.
9. Promote, implement, and evolve development best practices, especially on commits, versioning, and dependency management.

What You Need to Have:

1. 7+ years of experience designing and developing distributed application architecture of moderate-to-high complexity.
2. 7+ years of experience designing and developing distributed application architectures of moderate-to-high complexity.
3. 7+ years of software engineering experience, with strong backend development expertise in Java and Python.
4. Strong hands-on experience building scalable backend services using technologies such as Spring Boot, Fast API, or similar frameworks.
5. 5+ years of experience designing and developing scalable web applications using modern front-end frameworks such as React, TypeScript.
6. Proven experience building and supporting microservices-based architectures in cloud-native environments.
7. Hands-on experience designing and deploying AI/ML solutions in production.
8. Strong knowledge of generative AI concepts, including experience with embeddings, vector stores, RAG, and LLM integration.
9. Experience building GenAI applications using tools and frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, and leading LLM providers or open-source models.
10. Experience with relational databases such as Oracle or PostgreSQL, and familiarity with NoSQL and search technologies such as MongoDB, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, or Solr.
11. Expertise in modern package management, test frameworks (e.g., NPM, Yarn, Webpack, Jest, Enzyme, Karma, Jasmine, Mocha, Wraith), CI/CD pipelines using GIT and modern DevSecOps practices, including automation, testing, and secure software delivery.
12. Experience working in high-performance teams using Agile methodologies.
13. Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What Would Make You Stand Out:

1. Experience building AI-enabled features for customer-facing enterprise applications.
2. Exposure to AWS services such as EC2, S3, Route 53, CloudFront, CloudFormation, and networking concepts such as VPCs, subnets, and security groups.
3. Experience with containerization and container orchestration technologies.
4. Familiarity with data engineering and modern data architecture patterns.
5. Experience with observability, monitoring, and production support for distributed systems.
6. Familiarity with Atlassian tools such as JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Bamboo.
7. Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical standards across teams.
8. Exposure to business intelligence or data visualization tools.

Why Fitch?

At Fitch Group, the combined power of our global perspectives is what differentiates us. Our global network of colleagues comes together to accomplish things greater than they ever could alone.

Every team member is essential to our business and each perspective is critical to our success. We embrace a diverse culture that encourages a free exchange of ideas, guaranteeing your voice will be heard and your work will have an impact, regardless of seniority.

We are building incredible things at Fitch and we invite you to join us on our journey.

Add specific About Company Template for business, if req is Fitch Group please disregard

Fitch Group is a global leader in financial information services with operations in more than 30 countries. Wholly owned by the Hearst Corporation, we are comprised of three main businesses: Fitch Ratings | Fitch Solutions | Fitch Learning.

For more information please visit our websites:  

www.fitchratings.com | www.fitchsolutions.com | www.fitchlearning.com

Fitch is committed to providing global securities markets with objective, timely, independent and forward-looking credit opinions. To protect Fitch’s credibility and reputation, our employees must take every precaution to avoid conflicts of interests or any appearance of a conflict of interest. Should you be successful in the recruitment process at Fitch Ratings you will be asked to declare any securities holdings and other potential conflicts prior to commencing employment. If you, or your immediate family, have any holdings that may conflict with your work responsibilities, you may be asked to divest yourself of them before beginning work.

Fitch Group is proud to be an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, protected veteran status, and other statuses protected by law.

FOR CHICAGO ROLES ONLY: Expected base pay rates for the role will be between $135,000 and $145,000 per year. Actual salaries will be determined on an individualized basis and may vary based on factors including but not limited to education, training, experience, past performance, and other job-related factors.  Base pay is one part of Fitch’s total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may also include commission earnings, discretionary bonuses, long-term incentives, and other benefits sponsored by Fitch. 

Section 3: Appendix – “About Company” Boilerplates

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