Lead Engineer, Agentic Solutions & Automation

About the job

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 with enterprise risk, security, privacy, compliance, and model-risk expectations.
• Experience delivering automation or AI solutions in financial services, particularly wealth management, financial operations, or regulated customer workflows.
• Demonstrated success measuring adoption, developer productivity, operational efficiency, quality, risk reduction, or customer outcomes from platform investments.

The role being advertised is an existing vacancy.

About Manulife and John Hancock

Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider, helping people make their decisions easier and lives better. To learn more about us, visit https://www.manulife.com/en/about/our-story.html.

Manulife is an Equal Opportunity Employer

At Manulife/John Hancock, we embrace our diversity. We strive to attract, develop and retain a workforce that is as diverse as the customers we serve and to foster an inclusive work environment that embraces the strength of cultures and individuals. We are committed to fair recruitment, retention, advancement and compensation, and we administer all of our practices and programs without discrimination on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or religious beliefs, creed, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), sexual orientation, genetic characteristics, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by applicable law.

It is our priority to remove barriers to provide equal access to employment. A Human Resources representative will work with applicants who request a reasonable accommodation during the application process. All information shared during the accommodation request process will be stored and used in a manner that is consistent with applicable laws and Manulife/John Hancock policies. To request a reasonable accommodation in the application process, contact hr@manulife.com.

Referenced Salary Location

Boston, Massachusetts

Working Arrangement

Hybrid

Salary range is expected to be between

$127,330.00 USD - $236,470.00 USD

Employees also have the opportunity to participate in incentive programs and earn incentive compensation tied to business and individual performance. The actual salary will vary depending on local market conditions, geography and relevant job-related factors such as knowledge, skills, qualifications, experience, and education/training. If you are applying for this role outside of the primary location, please contact hr@manulife.com for the salary range for your location.

Manulife/John Hancock offers eligible employees a wide array of customizable benefits, including health, dental, mental health, vision, short- and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance coverage, adoption/surrogacy and wellness benefits, and employee/family assistance plans. We also offer eligible employees various retirement savings plans (including pension/401(k) savings plans and a global share ownership plan with employer matching contributions) and financial education and counseling resources. Our generous paid time off program in the U.S. includes up to 11 paid holidays, 3 personal days, 150 hours of vacation, and 40 hours of sick time (or more where required by law) each year, and we offer the full range of statutory leaves of absence.

We use data and analytics technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), and automated processing tools, to analyze and process the information you provide to us or third parties in the application process. For more information, please refer to our personal information collection statement.

Know Your Rights I Family & Medical Leave I Employee Polygraph Protection I Right to Work I E-Verify

Company: John Hancock Life Insurance Company (U.S.A.)