Distinguished Engineer

Who You'll Work With

Driving lasting impact and building long-term capabilities with our clients is not easy work. You are the kind of person who thrives in a high performance/high reward culture - doing hard things, picking yourself up when you stumble, and having the resilience to try another way forward.

In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we'll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities you need to become a stronger leader faster than you ever thought possible. Your colleagues—at all levels—will invest deeply in your development, just as much as they invest in delivering exceptional results for clients. Every day, you'll receive apprenticeship, coaching, and exposure that will accelerate your growth in ways you won’t find anywhere else.

When you join us, you will have:

• Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.
• A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions, all while upholding our unwavering commitment to ethics and integrity. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.
• Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions for our clients. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
• World-class benefits: On top of a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we provide a comprehensive benefits package to enable holistic well-being for you and your family.

Your Impact

You will lead cross-functional teams and architect transformative software solutions, drive innovation, and shape engineering strategies for scalable impact.

Your work combines three hats: a distinguished engineer who owns reference architectures and technical decisions, a trusted counselor to client CTOs and CxOs, and a leader of forward deployed engineers.

You’ll mentor talent, build trusted technical relationships, and collaborate globally to solve complex challenges and develop world-class technology assets.

You’ll resolve complex problems, shape engineering roadmaps, and foster a high-performing organizational culture. Partnering with leaders across Product, Design, and TechOps, you’ll refine processes, establish best practices, and build world-class technology solutions. You will own the technical relationship with client executives, shape their AI and agentic roadmaps, and help shape agendas.

Your work will create real-world impact by solving complex problems that matter. You’ll build and scale reusable core components across infrastructure, platforms, and services, enabling McKinsey and its financial services clients to accelerate product development. By collaborating with strategic partners and leveraging cutting-edge technology, you’ll help shape the future of software engineering and deliver measurable results.

You will lead the development of industry-shaping software solutions and drive innovation across a wide range of technology assets. You will be based in New York or the Bay Area, collaborating with cross-functional teams of developers, Agile coaches, designers, and business strategists, creating high-value, high-quality, and scalable technology solutions that address complex client challenges.

Your work offers an unparalleled opportunity to shape how agentic AI is built and governed in financial services. Supported by McKinsey’s global network of experts and 100 years of leadership development, you’ll rapidly expand your expertise and influence. Working alongside inspiring, multidisciplinary teams, you’ll gain exposure to diverse challenges and develop the skills to lead at the forefront of technology innovation.

Your Qualifications and Skills

• Advanced degree in a quantitative field (e.g., computer science, machine learning, applied statistics or mathematics), or equivalent experience
• 15+ years of relevant experience, including technical leadership at the Staff, Principal or Distinguished level and a track record as a trusted advisor to senior management, executives, technical audiences or clients
• Experience leading cross-functional, matrixed development teams and growing teams of 10–25 engineers to build and maintain cloud-native SaaS solutions
• Track record of hiring, mentoring and developing Staff and Principal engineers, with a servant leadership mindset and a focus on building a culture of trust
• Deep experience with end-to-end product and software development lifecycles (PDLC and SDLC), including tools and approaches that use agentic AI to accelerate both
• Hands-on experience designing and building agentic solutions across open-source frameworks, including A2A/MCP interfaces, agent skills and harnesses
• Experience building the data and knowledge layers required for agents, including retrieval, semantic layers, ontologies and NL-to-SQL
• Deep knowledge of enterprise AI and agentic controls, including AI control planes, identity and access, evaluations, guardrails and gateways
• Strong architectural skills, including owning reference architectures and ADRs, diagramming and technical writing, with deep knowledge of the external platform and technology landscape to guide build vs. assemble vs. buy decisions
• Track record of building 0-to-1 products, ideally in a start-up environment, including managing third-party development partners to deliver high levels of value, usability, quality and predictability
• Ability to shape client AI and agentic strategies and roadmaps, translate them into scoped and fundable engagements, and lead client workshops, executive readouts and solution demonstrations
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder-management skills, including balancing product requirements and expectations, proactively resolving issues, adapting communication to different audiences and seniority levels, and clearly explaining technical possibilities and limitations to non-technical stakeholders.