• Define and execute Candescent’s AI vision aligned with product and platform strategy • Lead development of AI-powered features across the digital banking platform, including fraud detection, smart personalization, chat and voice assistants, and intelligent automation • Champion AI used cases in open banking—powering smarter financial decisions through data aggregation, partner integrations, and predictive analytics • Drive integration of third-party AI tools and services into Candescent’s platform through APIs and SDKs • Partner with Product and Engineering to design secure, compliant, and scalable AI capabilities across our customer-facing and internal platforms • Lead internal AI adoption to accelerate developer productivity, automate testing, and improve support operations • Oversee full AI/ML lifecycle—ideation, experimentation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration • Establish and enforce best practices in model governance, bias mitigation, responsible AI, and model explainability • Represent AI strategy in executive forums, customer meetings, and industry events • Hire, mentor, and grow a high-performing global team of ML engineers, data scientists, and platform AI specialists