Director - Applied AI

Since 1935, Morgan Stanley is known as a global leader in financial services, always evolving and innovating to better serve our clients and our communities in more than 40 countries around the world. In the Legal & Compliance division, we assist the Firm in achieving its business objectives by facilitating and overseeing the Firm's management of legal, regulatory, and franchise risk.

We're seeking a Director - Applied AI to join our Non-Financial Risk team to design, build, and deploy AI-powered applications, agents, and plugins. These solutions will help Legal, Compliance, and Financial Crimes stakeholders manage legal, regulatory, and franchise risk and identify suspicious activity and potential financial crimes.

This is a Director level position within the NFR Data & Analytics team, which is responsible for designing and delivering AI-powered surveillance solutions and tools to help identify suspicious and/or illegal behaviors like money laundering, market manipulation, insider trading, unfair sales or trading practices and other financial crimes. The role will also deliver machine-assisted solutions that support the creation of Non-Financial Risk components, including processing regulatory rules, identifying policy gaps, determining primary and residual risks, and creating actionable controls for inclusion in testing programs.

What you'll do in the role:

• Design and build high-performance AI applications leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Agentic AI architecture, including multi-agent orchestration and planning, tool/function calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over vector stores and knowledge graphs, short- and long-term memory and context management, structured outputs, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Build prompts, skills, agents, and tools, and package them as plugins for end-user platforms such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, OpenAI Enterprise, and Claude Enterprise.
• Create GenAI-based solutions to automate manual tasks and drive cost efficiency.
• Partner with technology and infrastructure teams to take AI solutions and plugins from prototype to production, including deployment, monitoring, and ongoing support.
• Evaluate emerging AI engineering tools, frameworks, and platform capabilities to enhance our solutions.
• Collaborate with Compliance, Legal, Financial Crimes, and IT stakeholders to champion the adoption of new AI tools, techniques and capabilities.

What you'll bring to the role:

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Engineering, or another highly technical discipline
• 5+ years of hands-on industry experience in software and application engineering, including significant recent experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications to solve complex business problems
• Hands-on experience designing and developing AI applications with foundation model APIs, prompts, reusable skills, agents, and tools, including function/tool calling, APIs, and Model Context Protocol servers
• Experience packaging and integrating AI solutions as plugins and extensions for enterprise end-user platforms such as Microsoft 365 Copilot (e.g., declarative agents, API plugins, Copilot Studio), OpenAI Enterprise (e.g., custom GPTs, actions, connectors), and Claude Enterprise (e.g., skills, connectors, MCP integrations)
• Strong prompt and context engineering skills, including grounding with enterprise data (RAG), structured outputs, guardrails, and prompt versioning
• Experience with AI application frameworks and SDKs such as LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, OpenAI SDK, Anthropic SDK, etc.
• Excellent skills in either Python (preferred) or Java, with a strong command of software design principles, REST APIs, and JSON schema design
• Experience with benchmark creation and evaluation of prompts, agents, and tools, including LLM-as-a-Judge based techniques

What will set you apart:

• Proven experience partnering with technology, infrastructure, security, and platform teams to take AI solutions and plugins from prototype to production
• Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), cloud and on-premises deployment, and environment promotion and release management
• Understanding of enterprise integration and security requirements, including API gateways, authentication and authorization (SSO, OAuth), secrets management, data entitlements, and privacy controls
• Experience with monitoring, logging, observability, usage and cost tracking, and production support of AI applications, including documenting architectures and runbooks for operations teams
• Familiarity with governance, risk, and control requirements for deploying AI solutions in a regulated environment, including auditability and human-in-the-loop oversight
• Experience in adhering to Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) principles include GIT related operations
• Strong problem solving and time management skills
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Familiarity with financial markets, especially in Compliance, Non-Financial Risk, and Fraud analytics
• Knowledge of Vector Stores, Linux, SPARQL, and Graph Databases

Please note that the location listed for this role is temporary. The position’s work location will transition to 1445 Ross Ave, Dallas, TX 75202 at a future date. In-Person interviews will be required for the role. 

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM MORGAN STANLEY:

At Morgan Stanley, we raise, manage and allocate capital for our clients – helping them reach their goals. We do it in a way that’s differentiated – and we’ve done that for 90 years.  Our values - putting clients first, doing the right thing, leading with exceptional ideas, committing to diversity and inclusion, and giving back - aren’t just beliefs, they guide the decisions we make every day to do what's best for our clients, communities and more than 80,000 employees in 1,200 offices across 42 countries. At Morgan Stanley, you’ll find an opportunity to work alongside the best and the brightest, in an environment where you are supported and empowered. Our teams are relentless collaborators and creative thinkers, fueled by their diverse backgrounds and experiences. We are proud to support our employees and their families at every point along their work-life journey, offering some of the most attractive and comprehensive employee benefits and perks in the industry. There’s also ample opportunity to move about the business for those who show passion and grit in their work.

To learn more about our offices across the globe, please copy and paste https://www.morganstanley.com/about-us/global-offices​ into your browser.

Morgan Stanley is an equal opportunity employer committed to building and maintaining a workforce that is diverse in experience and background.  Our recruiting efforts reflect our strong commitment to a culture of inclusion, where individuals are hired, developed, and advanced based on their skills and talents.

Our workforce reflects a broad cross-section of the global communities in which we operate, bringing a variety of backgrounds, talents, perspectives, and experiences.

For more information, please visit: https://www.morganstanley.com/people-opportunities/eeo.