Director, AI Application Engineering
About The Position
Use Case Engineering is the production delivery arm of Marriott's AI Engineering organization. It embeds forward deployed AI engineers with teams across the enterprise, delivers high-priority AI use cases from intake through production, and turns deliveries into reusable patterns, SDKs, and reference architectures. The Director, AI Application Engineering owns the engineering of AI applications and agent systems across a portfolio of enterprise use cases. The role leads forward deployed engineers, sets architecture, and remains hands-on in the code. It oversees complex engagements involving multi-system integrations, vendor engineering teams, and decisions that establish precedents for the AI program. The director works across build, consult, advise, and monitor engagements and is accountable for production delivery and what happens after handoff. This position reports to the Senior Director, AI Engineering.
Requirements
- 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years building AI or machine learning applications, enterprise integrations, or platform services; alternatively, 6+ years with a Master's degree.
- Production-grade Python and/or TypeScript.
- Hands-on LLM application development, including agent design, tool calling, prompt engineering, retrieval, and evaluation.
- Working depth in the agent interoperability stack: MCP, A2A, Watson ADK, and LangChain or comparable frameworks.
- Technical leadership across several concurrent teams or deliveries.
- Daily use of AI-powered coding assistants as working engineering tools.
- Experience directing vendor engineering teams or systems integrators.
Nice To Haves
- Rust experience.
- Experience with two or more enterprise AI platforms, such as AWS, Azure or Vertex, watsonx, Writer, Copilot Studio, or comparable platforms.
- Production retrieval systems, including vector stores, embedding models, chunking and context strategy, and offline and online evaluation.
- Multi-agent orchestration frameworks or vendor-native agent SDKs.
- Reusable engineering assets, such as SDKs, libraries, or reference architectures, adopted by teams outside the candidate's own team.
- Enterprise AI governance and compliance workflows, including security, privacy, and model risk.
- REST API integration design in a large enterprise and architecture documentation that stands up to a review board.
- Hospitality, travel, or large-scale consumer services experience.
Responsibilities
- Lead forward deployed engineers delivering AI applications and agents for a business vertical, maintaining the technical bar from intake through production handoff.
- Design and build agent systems, tool and API integrations, and retrieval pipelines on the enterprise AI platform stack using vendor SDKs and agent development kits.
- Own portfolio architecture decisions and guide them through enterprise governance gates, including agent tier classification, security engagement review, and architecture review.
- Direct vendor and systems integrator engineering teams, set design direction, and ensure quality.
- Establish evaluation and monitoring for shipped solutions so agent quality is measured.
- Contribute working patterns, SDK modules, and reference implementations to the shared library, and retire those that are no longer useful.
- Build handoff packages, including runbooks, dashboards, and documentation, to enable business and platform partners to own solutions long term.
- Mentor engineers across the function and establish architectural guardrails.
Benefits
- 401(k) plan
- Stock purchase plan
- Discounts at Marriott properties
- Commuter benefits
- Employee assistance plan
- Childcare discounts
- Medical coverage
- Dental coverage
- Vision coverage
- Health care flexible spending account
- Dependent care flexible spending account
- Life insurance
- Disability insurance
- Accident insurance
- Adoption expense reimbursements
- Paid parental leave
- Educational assistance
- Washington employees accrue paid sick leave (0.077 PTO balance for every hour worked) and are eligible to receive a minimum of 9 holidays annually.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
