Vice President, AI Product Engineer

Oaktree is a leader among global investment managers specializing in alternative investments, with over $200 billion in assets under management. The firm emphasizes an opportunistic, value-oriented and risk-controlled approach to investments in credit, private equity, real assets and listed equities.  The firm has over 1400 employees and offices in 25 cities worldwide.

We are committed to cultivating an environment that is collaborative, curious, inclusive and honors diversity of thought. Providing training and career development opportunities and emphasizing strong support for our local communities through philanthropic initiatives are essential to our culture.

The Technology department at Oaktree Capital Management delivers secure, scalable, and innovative solutions that power the firm’s global investment and business operations. Through strong partnerships across the company, we drive digital transformation, advance operational efficiency, and provide a trusted data foundation to create measurable impact for Oaktree’s teams, clients, and partners.

For additional information please visit our website at www.oaktreecapital.com.

Summary

Oaktree is seeking to hire an AI Product Engineer to join our Product Engineering group. This role is for someone who thrives on turning the latest advances in LLMs and generative AI into working, useful products. You’ll be part architect, part engineer, part product hacker—taking AI from idea to prototype to production at a high velocity.

You’ll work closely with other engineers, product thinkers, and internal stakeholders to build AI-native applications, intelligent copilots, RAG pipelines, and task-specific agents that solve real business problems. We’re looking for someone who deeply understands the capabilities and constraints of modern AI—and knows how to use them to ship differentiated, high-leverage tools.

Qualifications:

• ​​​8+ years of software engineering or ML experience, with 3+ years focused on LLMs, NLP, or applied AI.
• Proven track record shipping production AI tools or platforms used by real users.
• Deep experience with Python, LangChain/OpenAI SDK, embeddings, RAG architecture, and vector DBs.
• Strong product sense—ability to define problems, measure impact, and drive iterative improvement.
• Hands-on experience optimizing LLM workflows for latency, cost, performance, and reliability.
• Ability to think from first principles and manage ambiguity across both technical and product domains.
• Experience with model fine-tuning, LoRA, or open-source model hosting (e.g., Hugging Face, Ollama, BentoML).
• Familiarity with agentic design, LangGraph, or task decomposition frameworks.
• Exposure to product analytics (Amplitude, Mixpanel, custom telemetry) and A/B testing of AI features.
• Experience building internal tools or workflows that increased efficiency or automation.
• Experience in designing user flows while simultaneously optimizing a prompt or embedding index.

Responsibilities:

• Prototype LLM-powered tools, copilots, and retrieval-based workflows using APIs, embeddings, and orchestration frameworks.
• Build full-stack AI features with robust infrastructure, including retrieval logic, prompt pipelines, caching, evaluation, and observability.
• Own the full AI lifecycle—from data preparation and experimentation to deployment and monitoring.
• Rapidly evaluate new models and frameworks (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, open-source) to test what works and discard what doesn’t.
• Monitor and improve system performance: accuracy, latency, hallucination, and user satisfaction.
• Translate ambiguous user or business needs into scoped, AI-capable features with clear goals and success metrics.
• Prioritize experiments and features based on impact, feasibility, and data—balancing speed with quality.
• Conduct internal or external user testing to validate product direction, gather feedback, and improve iteratively.
• Define KPIs and success criteria for AI-driven products, and track performance over time.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to align AI initiatives with product strategy, roadmap planning, and stakeholder needs.
• Act as a product owner for AI systems: making trade-offs, communicating rationale, and ensuring continuous learning from usage data.
• Ship fast, iterate smartly, and create real value—without waiting for perfect conditions and build systems that are observable, scalable, and evolve with usage.
• Help shape a company-wide culture of AI innovation and responsible deployment.

Education:

Bachelors degree is required. Master’s in computer or data science preferred.

Base Salary Range

$190,000 - $225,000

In addition to a competitive base salary, you will be eligible to receive discretionary bonus incentives, a comprehensive benefits package and a flexible work arrangement.  The base salary offered will be commensurate with experience and/or qualifications, industry knowledge and expertise, as well as prior training and education.

Equal Opportunity Employment Policy

Oaktree is committed to diversity and to equal opportunity employment. Oaktree does not make employment decisions on the basis of race, creed, color, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, past or present physical or mental disability, HIV status, medical condition as defined by state law (genetic characteristics or cancer), pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, veteran status, military service, marital status, familial status, genetic information, domestic violence victim status or any other classification protected by applicable federal, state and local laws and ordinances. This policy applies to hiring, placement, internal promotions, training, opportunities for advancement, recruitment advertising, transfers, demotions, layoffs, terminations, recruitment advertising, rates of pay and other forms of compensation and all other terms, conditions and privileges of employment. This policy applies to all Oaktree applicants, employees, clients, and contractors. Staff members wishing to report violations or suspected violations of this policy should contact the head of their department or Human Resources.

For positions based in Los Angeles

For those applying for a position in the city of Los Angeles, the firm will consider for employment qualified applicants with a criminal history in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.