AI Platform Leader

Dempsey & Siders Agency•Cincinnati, OH

2d•Onsite

About The Position

The AI Platform Leader is accountable for the technical direction and engineering execution of our enterprise AI platform. You set the technical strategy, make the build decisions, and lead the engineering work that turns the platform vision into a working, secure, and scalable system that serves Software Developers, Data Scientists, and Knowledge Workers. You operate at the intersection of platform engineering and AI infrastructure, designing the integration patterns, evaluating and selecting the LLMs, frameworks, and reference architectures the enterprise will standardize on, and staying close to the code. Roadmap, prioritization, and consumer adoption are owned by partners. Your job is to make sure what we build is technically right.

Requirements

Strong AI engineer and builder. Recent, hands-on experience designing and shipping production AI systems, including LLM integrations, RAG, agents, evaluation pipelines, and fine-tuning where appropriate.
10+ years in software engineering, including 3+ leading engineering teams, with recent experience as a working architect, principal engineer, or staff engineer.
Working knowledge of LLM APIs and gateways, model registries, MCP servers, agent frameworks, vector stores, retrieval and re-ranking, evaluation and observability tooling, prompt and context engineering, API gateways, IAM, and CI/CD.
Deep familiarity with platform engineering as a discipline: self-service design, golden paths, automation-first operations, and governance by design. You understand why these principles matter and have applied them in practice.
Track record of setting technical direction across teams you do not directly control through architectural clarity, working code, and credibility.
The ability to explain complex technical concepts to any level of understanding, from subject matter expert to executive, and represent P&C IT’s AI strategy and approach in any audience.
Comfortable partnering with a Technical Product Manager who will collaborate to build a roadmap, prioritize features, and drive adoption.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end engineering of the AI platform, including the LLM gateway, model abstraction tiers, agent runtimes, RAG systems, MCP servers, observability, and the integration patterns that tie them together.
Define and maintain the reference architectures, golden paths, and design patterns that consumer teams adopt across all five delivery phases: Foundation, Software Developers, Data Scientists, Knowledge Workers, and Platform Maturity.
Stay deep in the technology. Prototype emerging capabilities, including new models, agent frameworks, and evaluation tooling, before committing the platform to them.
Lead engineering reviews and design sessions for major platform components and complex consumer integrations.
Resolve the hardest technical problems personally when needed, including model performance, latency, cost, accuracy, and integration issues.
Author or co-author the most consequential design documents and technical RFCs for the platform.
Build governance, safety controls, evaluation, and compliance into the platform from Phase 1, enforced in code rather than by policy alone.
Automate operational tasks, including model onboarding, access provisioning, telemetry, and compliance checks, so the team size is never the bottleneck.
Establish and maintain a technical review cadence with architecture, security, and data stakeholders.