Head of AI

📍 Almaty

We are looking for a great Head of AI for our Bank! If you have gone through the journey from hypothesis to industrial scaling, can manage strong specialists and speak the same language as the business — we need exactly you.

Key goal of the position: Building an effective AI development management model in the Bank. Ensuring the transition from point pilots to industrial scaling, managing the portfolio of AI initiatives and developing the engineering culture in the team (from 20+ specialists).

📈 Main tasks:

Team and delivery management:

• Managing a distributed team of AI/ML engineers and team leads (hiring, development, evaluation).
• Forming product teams (squads) for business tasks, resource allocation.
• Managing the backlog: prioritization, planning, quality and deadline control.

Development of AI development processes:

• Implementing end-to-end ML/AI processes: from data collection to industrial operation (MLOps/LLMOps).
• Standardizing approaches and best practices to increase result predictability.
• Adapting Agile to the specifics of AI projects with an R&D component.

Bringing solutions to industrial operation:

• Reducing time-to-market: quickly transferring PoC/MVP to a stable productive cycle.
• Ensuring scalability, fault tolerance and monitoring of AI systems.
• Interacting with DevOps and Data Engineering to build production infrastructure.

Cross-functional interaction and strategy:

• Communication with business customers, information security, IT architecture; translating complex solutions into business language.
• Forming and defending the AI development strategy, building long-term roadmaps.
• Analyzing trends (GenAI, Agentic AI) and assessing their applicability in finance.

🎈 Key requirements:

• Experience in managing AI teams of 20+ people (including team leads).
• Managing the full cycle of AI products: from hypothesis to production and post-production support.
• Understanding the differences between research and product development.

🪄 Hard Skills:

• Expertise in end-to-end ML/AI processes (data, training, validation, MLOps).
• Practical experience with GenAI (LLM, RAG, agent systems).
• Understanding the architecture of scalable AI services.
• Proficiency in Agile/Scrum/Kanban in the context of Data Science.

🌟 Soft Skills:

• Systems thinking and strategic approach.
• Strong communication skills, working in a complex organizational structure (bank/large business).
• Ability to translate technical challenges into business language.
• Leadership qualities: developing engineering culture and responsibility for results.

Will be an advantage:

• Experience in implementing AI platforms and MLOps solutions.
• Participation in transformation programs.
• Technical background (DS/ML/Software Engineering) at the architectural understanding level.

📩 aruzhan.esimzhanova@bcc.kz