If you’re looking for a technology job in finance with high visibility, a job in AI for a bank might be on your Christmas list. Thankfully, an anonymous AI technologist is here to help; she’s holding an AMA in our new anonymous community, The Bubble, and has already dispensed advice on the skills and experience you need to work in AI at a major bank.
Click here to join the bubble by eFinancialCareers, our new anonymous community. ✍️
The engineer said she has worked in AI for “close to 15 years [with] a physics background,” but said the educational requirements are shifting, depending on how you work with foundational models. “If you want to be a data scientist or AI engineer who consumes these models, then does fine-tuning, a data science/engineering education is sufficient,” she said. For AI researcher roles building those models, you need to “start with the fundamentals.” This means studying advanced statistics and partial differential equations, as well as computer science.
Not all AI jobs in finance are hands-on; you might find you’re better suited to a job as an AI product manager. The engineer said these people are “typically translating qualitative customer and consumer needs into prioritized features and functionality for an application.” You then work with the engineering team for your application to actualize those features. As it requires more business knowledge, the engineer said people that go into these roles either start out as management consultants in the AI sector, or work as engineers first then get an MBA.
If you’re on the opposite side of the coin, and are worried about generative AI replacing your job, you have time to save yourself. The engineer said that mainstream AI tools are “typically poorly adopted and under utilized due to performance issues. They’re typically used for question answering, and at best used for agentic RAG (retrieval augmented generation)”. She said that, once smaller, specialized language models see widespread adoption, their efficiency (and threat to job security) may be more real.
Preserving your job in the AI-age requires some homework. The engineer said “something as simple as setting aside a weekend to try building a model context protocol (MCP) server can give you a level of insight most don’t have into where and how best to apply these emerging AI tools.” She advises that you experiment hands-on with the various publicly available AI tools to maintain “modern AI tool literacy.” This will “put you miles ahead of the majority of the majority of people.”
Various companies have already cited AI as a cause for headcount reductions, and the engineer said these “redundancies have been executed far in advance of operationalization of relevant AI tooling.” Executives in finance seem to be realizing that and swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction; a recent survey by Bloomberg of senior financial services employees revealed that more than half of respondents expected their workforce to grow by at least 6% in the next three years. If you haven’t increased your AI literacy by 2029, that’s on you.
Want to know more about AI in finance? The engineer’s AMA ends tomorrow; follow the link below to sign up to The Bubble, our new anonymous forum and raise your question while you still can. We’ve recently put The Bubble into an open beta, and have created a community of over 3,000 finance professionals, including employees from major investment banks and trading firms, as well as prospective professionals from top universities. We’re planning AMAs like this one as a regular feature, so make sure to check back regularly for them.
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