Vice President of Software Engineering - HR Technology

Job description

## Your Team Responsibilities MSCI's HR Technology team builds and operates the platforms and applications that support approximately 6,300 employees across global offices. The team runs a modern HR data platform on Azure Databricks and is actively building an agentic application layer on top of it — intelligent tools for recruiting, compensation, position management, HR operations, and more. The team's philosophy is practitioner-grounded: build things that work, ship them to real users, learn from how they are used, and improve. We use Anthropic Claude as our primary AI model, Databricks as our application and intelligence platform, and Workday and iCIMS as our core HR systems of record. We are early in an ambitious build cycle. The right engineer will find this genuinely exciting. This is an application and AI engineering role, not a data engineering role. The Lead Software Engineer, HR Technology builds intelligent solutions — conversational agents, workflow automation, and HR applications — that change how MSCI's 6,300 employees experience HR. The platform those solutions run on is Azure Databricks. But the job is building things people use, not building pipelines. You are a senior engineer who has shipped production software and is comfortable taking ownership of complex, ambiguous problems. You know how to work with AI models — prompt them, integrate them, build reliable agent workflows around them — and you know how to deliver applications that non-technical users can actually navigate. You bring engineering rigor to a space that is moving fast and has real business stakes. This role sits at the center of MSCI HR Technology's AI agenda. The HR Data Platform is live. The intelligence layer is being built now. You will be a primary builder of it. ## Your Key Responsibilities **AI agents and intelligent applications** - Design and ship conversational agents that help HR teams and employees get answers, take actions, and move work forward — without touching a system directly - Build multi-step agentic workflows with tool use, structured outputs, and human-in-the-loop controls that are reliable enough to run in production - Integrate LLM APIs — primarily Anthropic Claude — into applications through patterns that are robust, testable, and maintainable - Develop MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers that give AI agents structured, secure access to enterprise systems including Workday and iCIMS - Evaluate and adopt emerging AI capabilities as they become available — you are expected to know what is coming before it arrives **HR applications that solve real problems** - Build and deploy web applications that HR practitioners and employees interact with directly — approvals, intake forms, dashboards, status tools - Translate complex HR requirements from Talent Acquisition, Compensation, HR Operations, and other functions into working software - Own end-to-end delivery: from requirements through development, testing, deployment, and iteration based on real usage - Build applications that integrate with enterprise systems — Workday, iCIMS, ServiceNow — and make those systems more accessible through intelligent interfaces **Integrations and platform connectivity** - Design and implement integrations between HR systems using REST APIs and MCP server patterns - Ensure the applications you build have clean, reliable connections to the data and systems they depend on - Work with data engineers on the team to make sure application data needs are properly served by the platform layer - Contribute to the engineering standards and reusable patterns that make future integrations faster and more consistent **Technical standards and collaboration** - Define the engineering patterns the team builds from — code quality, application architecture, integration design - Raise the technical bar through code review, pairing, and the quality of what you ship - Participate in architecture reviews and sprint planning as the senior engineering voice - Communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders about what is being built, why, and when - Participate in the HR AI Lab demo series — show the work, explain the thinking, represent engineering ## Your skills and experience that will help you excel **Required** - 10+ years of software engineering experience building and shipping production applications - Strong Python development skills — application development, API integration, agent framework usage - Proven experience designing and implementing AI agent workflows — LLM API integration, tool use, prompt engineering — in production - Experience building web applications or tools that real users interact with, not just backend pipelines - Comfort integrating enterprise SaaS platforms via REST APIs - Experience working with cloud platforms — Azure preferred — deploying and operating applications in production - The ability to communicate clearly about technical decisions with stakeholders who did not build the system **Preferred** - Experience with Databricks as an application and deployment platform — Databricks Apps, Streamlit on Databricks, notebook-based development - Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) server development and agentic integration patterns - Experience with Anthropic Claude or other LLM APIs in a production setting - Background in HR technology or enterprise workflow applications - Exposure to Workday, iCIMS, or similar HCM and ATS platforms - Experience in a regulated or financial services environment **What Good Looks Like** Within three months, you have shipped meaningful improvements to at least one production application, established a clear point of view on how the team should approach agent development, and demonstrated the kind of engineering judgment that makes others want to work alongside you. Within twelve months, you have delivered multiple AI-powered solutions that HR teams are using in their daily work, established the applicati