About the Role
Our client is looking for a Director of AI to lead the adoption, strategy, and execution of artificial intelligence initiatives across Product, Engineering, and Design. This is a unique player-coach leadership role that combines hands-on technical contribution with organizational enablement, helping teams leverage AI technologies to improve customer experiences, accelerate product delivery, and drive operational efficiency.
Key Responsibilities
AI Strategy & Organizational Enablement
- Define and execute the organization’s AI strategy across Product, Engineering, and Design functions.
- Establish frameworks, governance models, and best practices for AI adoption and responsible implementation.
- Drive AI maturity across teams by developing measurable goals, adoption metrics, and success benchmarks.
- Partner with leadership to identify opportunities where AI can create meaningful business and customer value.
- Promote a culture of experimentation, learning, and continuous improvement around AI technologies.
AI Platform & Technical Leadership
- Design, build, and maintain the foundational infrastructure required to support AI-powered products and workflows.
- Develop scalable frameworks for prompt management, context engineering, evaluation, observability, and model orchestration.
- Establish standards and processes for integrating AI capabilities into existing products and systems.
- Stay hands-on with development, contributing production-quality code and technical solutions.
- Evaluate emerging AI tools, technologies, and methodologies to ensure the organization remains at the forefront of innovation.
Coaching, Enablement & Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Mentor and support Product, Engineering, and Design teams in adopting AI-driven workflows and best practices.
- Build and cultivate a network of AI advocates and champions across the organization.
- Partner with Design teams to develop AI-powered user experiences, conversational interfaces, and intelligent workflows.
- Collaborate with technical and business stakeholders to balance innovation, quality, security, and compliance requirements.
- Foster alignment across teams by translating complex technical concepts into actionable business outcomes.
Team Leadership & Growth
- Lead and develop a small, high-impact AI function while influencing teams across the broader organization.
- Create scalable enablement programs that increase productivity, quality, and innovation.
- Support hiring, team development, and capability building as the AI function evolves.
- Establish clear ownership, accountability, and governance around AI-related initiatives.
Requirements
- Proven experience designing, building, and deploying AI or LLM-powered products in production environments.
- Hands-on expertise with modern AI technologies, including agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt engineering, model evaluation, and orchestration frameworks.
- Strong software engineering background with experience developing scalable, cloud-based applications.
- Practical experience with cloud platforms and services, databases, APIs, and distributed systems.
- Deep understanding of AI implementation challenges, including performance, reliability, governance, security, and compliance considerations.
- Demonstrated ability to balance strategic leadership with hands-on technical execution.
- Experience coaching, mentoring, and enabling technical teams to adopt new technologies and ways of working.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to engage both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to operate effectively in fast-paced, evolving environments.
- Experience leading platform, developer productivity, enablement, or technical transformation initiatives is highly desirable.
- Passion for emerging technologies and a track record of driving innovation that delivers measurable business impact.
- Willingness to travel periodically for team collaboration, workshops, and strategic planning sessions.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience implementing enterprise-wide AI enablement or transformation programs.
- Knowledge of AI governance, responsible AI practices, and operationalization frameworks.
- Experience building reusable internal platforms, tooling, or developer productivity solutions.
- Familiarity with AI-powered user experiences, conversational interfaces, and intelligent automation.
- Strong product mindset with the ability to connect technical decisions to customer and business outcomes.
- Proven ability to influence across functions and build alignment among diverse stakeholder groups.
