Lead Engineer, Agentic Solutions & Automation

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The Lead Engineer, Agentic Solutions & Automation will be a key member of the team responsible for advancing agentic platforms and intelligent automation across North American Wealth at Manulife/John Hancock. The successful candidate will play a leading role in driving adoption, owning significant transformation initiatives, establishing reusable platform capabilities and engineering practices, and delivering measurable business outcomes. Working with engineering, architecture, product, operations, risk, compliance, and business partners, this individual will translate strategic objectives into scalable capabilities that move agentic solutions from experimentation into secure, reliable production use. Initial priorities will include advancing an agentic software development lifecycle and improving Developer Experience, while applying the same capabilities to high-value opportunities across financial operations, back-office functions, marketing, and advisor and customer journeys. The role combines hands-on engineering, technical leadership, organizational enablement, governance, and accountability for meaningful adoption and impact in a regulated financial services environment.

Position Responsibilities

• Lead strategic initiatives that accelerate the adoption of agentic platforms and intelligent automation across North American Wealth, delivering measurable improvements in engineering effectiveness, operational efficiency, and business outcomes.

• Own the design and delivery of key components of the agentic SDLC, improving Developer Experience across discovery, requirements, design, development, testing, review, deployment, operations, and continuous improvement.

• Partner with engineering, architecture, product, operations, risk, compliance, and business teams to identify, prioritize, and deliver high-value agent use cases across financial operations, back-office functions, marketing, and advisor and customer journeys.

• Drive the development and adoption of reusable platform capabilities, reference architectures, patterns, tools, and integrations that enable teams to deliver agents securely and efficiently.

• Lead the establishment and operationalization of engineering standards and governance for agent identity, access, data protection, tool use, human oversight, auditability, evaluation, release controls, and lifecycle management in partnership with architecture, risk, security, and compliance stakeholders.

• Design and implement production-grade agentic systems using orchestration, retrieval, structured tool use, event-driven integration, and human-in-the-loop patterns.

• Establish and evolve evaluation, observability, and operational practices that enable teams to measure task completion, quality, safety, reliability, latency, cost, adoption, and business value throughout the solution lifecycle.

• Lead technical workshops, labs, demonstrations, and training that build practical agentic engineering capability across development teams and business partners.

• Coach and mentor engineers, build communities of practice, and raise organizational capability as teams move from proofs of concept to governed production solutions.

• Evaluate models, frameworks, platforms, and vendors; make pragmatic recommendations based on capability, interoperability, security, cost, performance, and strategic fit.

• Influence technology and portfolio direction through prototypes, technical assessments, architecture decisions, and data-driven recommendations to senior engineering and business leaders.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience, including technical leadership across complex enterprise platforms or transformation programs.

• Demonstrated ability to own and drive complex cross-functional initiatives, influence technical direction, and deliver organizational change through engineering leadership rather than formal authority.

• Strong hands-on experience designing and delivering distributed applications, APIs, event-driven systems, and cloud-native services using technologies such as Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, React, and SQL.

• Experience establishing production engineering practices across CI/CD, automated testing, security, observability, reliability, and operational readiness.

• Experience designing or implementing AI-enabled applications, agents, workflow automation, or LLM-based solutions using retrieval, tool calling, orchestration, and structured outputs.

• Working knowledge of AI evaluation, guardrails, privacy, security, human oversight, auditability, and risk controls for regulated environments.

• Ability to translate business processes and strategic objectives into reusable technical capabilities, delivery roadmaps, and measurable outcomes.

• Strong facilitation and communication skills, including experience leading technical workshops, training, design reviews, and executive-level discussions.

• Experience coaching engineers and raising organizational capability through standards, reference implementations, documentation, and communities of practice.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or an equivalent combination of education and professional experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with agent orchestration frameworks and open integration standards such as LangGraph, Microsoft Agent Framework, MCP, A2A, or equivalent technologies.

• Experience creating an internal developer platform, paved-road capabilities, reusable agent tooling, or self-service engineering experiences.

• Experience with Azure AI services, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure AI Search, Databricks, GitHub Actions, and enterprise observability platforms.

• Strong LLMOps or AgentOps experience, including prompt and model versioning, evaluation datasets, automated quality gates, tracing, telemetry, rollout strategies, and regression management.

• Experience establishing AI governance and Responsible AI practices aligned …