Conversational AI & Language Engineering Lead

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Role Summary

The Senior Technology Manager for Conversational AI & Language Engineering is a senior leadership role responsible for setting the technical vision, managing teams, and ensuring the long-term health and performance of the machine learning capabilities powering Bank of America's employee-facing Virtual Assistant.

This role is leadership-first: accountable for strategy, governance, prioritization, and outcomes across natural language understanding (NLU), speech recognition, and LLM-based capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

Technology Leadership & Ownership

• Own the end-to-end technical strategy for language engineering, NLU, and conversational AI across web, mobile, and voice channels.

• Define and evolve the intent portfolio and domain coverage (e.g., technology, human resources), ensuring alignment between conversation design, business needs, and ML capabilities.

• Establish standards and best practices for model quality, evaluation, telemetry, and lifecycle management.

• Provide senior-level technical oversight for model design, training approaches, performance tradeoffs, and production readiness.

• Serve as the accountable owner for model governance, including current and future registered models.

• Help transition a mature deterministic solution with over 650 capabilities to leverage Generative and Agentic AI.

People Management & Team Development

• Lead and develop a specialized, medium-sized team of language engineers and ML practitioners.

• Set clear priorities, expectations, and success metrics for the team, balancing delivery, quality, and innovation.

• Coach and mentor senior and mid-level engineers, raising the overall technical bar and creating clear growth paths.

• Ensure sustainable operating models that support scale, reliability, and continuous improvement.

Strategy, Roadmap & Stakeholder Partnership

• Define the conversational AI roadmap, integrating traditional NLU techniques with LLM and GenAI capabilities where appropriate.

• Partner with product owners, UX researchers, data scientists, and engineering leaders to shape the "brain" of the virtual assistant.

• Translate complex technical topics into clear, executive-level communication for stakeholders and leadership.

• Identify systemic gaps or underperforming areas through analytics and conversation monitoring, and drive multi-quarter improvement plans.

Required Skills & Experience

• Proven experience leading teams delivering conversational AI, NLP, or language-driven ML solutions.

• Strong background in natural language processing, intent classification, and speech recognition, with the ability to guide others rather than execute all work personally.

• Experience shaping and executing technical strategy across multiple domains and channels.

• Familiarity with LLMs and GenAI, including their application, limitations, and governance considerations in enterprise environments.

• Working knowledge of Python, ML workflows, and evaluation techniques sufficient to provide technical leadership and oversight.

• Experience with Agile and DevOps operating models.

• Strong analytical thinking, decision-making, and executive communication skills.

What Defines Success in This Role

• Teams deliver high-quality, scalable conversational intelligence with clear ownership and governance.

• Model performance, reliability, and user experience improve consistently over time.

• Stakeholders trust the function as a strategic partner, not just an implementation team.

• The organization has a clear, coherent vision for how NLU and LLMs power employee experiences.

Required Qualifications:

• Experience with conversational interfaces and natural language processing.

• Experience training machine learning algorithms for data classification and/or speech recognition.

• Experience improving intent recognition of a data classification model.

• Experience with python.

• Unique skillset in computational linguistics and technical experience.

• Familiarity with LLMs.

• Familiarity with using version control technologies such as git, svn, or JIRA.

• Experience in DevOps and Agile methodology.

• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills.

Skills:

• Automation

• Influence

• Result Orientation

• Stakeholder Management

• Technical Strategy Development

• Application Development

• Architecture

• Business Acumen

• Risk Management

• Solution Design

• Agile Practices

• Analytical Thinking

• Collaboration

• Data Management

• Solution Delivery Process

Shift:
1st shift (United States of America)

Hours Per Week:
40

Pay Transparency details

US - IL - Chicago - 540 W Madison St - Bank Of America Plaza (IL4540), US - NJ - Pennington - 1300 American Blvd - Hopewell Bldg 3 (NJ2130)

Pay and benefits information

Pay range

$122,000.00 - $200,000.00 annualized salary, offers to be determined based on experience, education and skill set.

Discretionary incentive eligible

This role is eligible to participate in the annual discretionary plan. Employees are eligible for an annual discretionary award based on their overall individual performance results and behaviors, the performance and contributions of their line of business and/or group; and the overall success of the Company.

Benefits

This role is currently benefits eligible. We provide industry-leading benefits, access to paid time off, resources and support to our employees so they can make a genuine impact and contribute to the sustainable growth of our business and the communities we serve.