Director, AI Engineering

Illumina•San Diego, CA

1d•$170,600 - $255,800•Onsite

About The Position

The Director, AI Engineering is a senior technical leader who partners with Principal Architects, business stakeholders, and engineering teams to translate enterprise strategy into scalable, AI-enabled technology solutions. This role blends deep hands-on technical depth across full-stack engineering, cloud platforms, and modern AI architectures with the leadership presence needed to influence cross-functional teams and shape long-range technology direction. The successful candidate will architect production-grade systems that integrate Generative AI, agentic workflows, and RAG-based retrieval into core enterprise applications, while mentoring engineering teams and establishing the patterns, guardrails, and platforms that allow AI to scale responsibly across the organization.

Requirements

15 or more years of progressive experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years in architecture or senior technical leadership roles.
Experience leading distributed engineering teams of 15+ across multiple time zones.
Deep hands-on expertise across full-stack development, including Python and Java ecosystems (Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, microservices).
Proven experience architecting and deploying Generative AI solutions in production, including RAG systems, prompt engineering, and LLM integration.
Strong command of at least one major cloud platform (GCP, Azure, or AWS), with demonstrated experience designing scalable, multi-tenant systems.
Track record of delivering enterprise-grade systems that serve large user bases with measurable performance and revenue outcomes.
Typically requires a minimum of 18 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 15 years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 12 years experience; or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience with agentic AI frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI) and multi-agent system design.
Familiarity with Voice AI and conversational AI platforms, including ASR, TTS, and dialog management.
Background in commerce platforms (Bloomreach, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Experience Cloud) or industrial and B2B e-commerce.
Exposure to data platforms (BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks) and modern data architectures (lakehouse, streaming, vector stores).
Industry certifications such as TOGAF, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or AWS Solutions Architect Professional.
Active engagement with the technology community through conference talks, publications, patents, or industry awards.
Senior membership in IEEE, ACM, or equivalent professional organization.

Responsibilities

Define reference architectures, design patterns, and platform standards for AI-enabled enterprise applications spanning web, mobile, and backend services.
Partner with the Principal Architect to develop multi-year technology roadmaps that align cloud, data, AI, and application strategy with business objectives.
Evaluate emerging technologies (foundation models, agentic frameworks, vector databases, MLOps tooling) and translate them into actionable adoption plans.
Lead architectural reviews, ensuring system designs meet requirements for scalability, security, performance, observability, and total cost of ownership.
Architect Generative AI solutions including RAG systems, multi-agent workflows, conversational interfaces, and domain-specific fine-tuned models.
Design responsible AI frameworks covering prompt engineering standards, evaluation pipelines, model governance, and content safety controls.
Establish MLOps and LLMOps practices for model deployment, monitoring, drift detection, and continuous improvement.
Integrate LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph) into production systems with appropriate fallback and cost controls.
Design cloud-native solutions on Google Cloud Platform, Azure, or AWS, leveraging managed AI services (Vertex AI, AlloyDB, Cloud Functions, equivalent services).
Architect CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and platform automation that accelerate engineering velocity without compromising reliability.
Define and enforce standards for containerization, microservices, API design, and event-driven architectures.
Provide technical leadership to engineering teams of 15 to 30 engineers, including UI developers, backend engineers, ML engineers, and platform specialists.
Mentor senior engineers and tech leads, growing the next generation of architects within the organization.
Partner with product, design, and business stakeholders to scope initiatives, manage trade-offs, and deliver measurable business outcomes.
Represent the architecture function in executive forums, vendor evaluations, and strategic planning sessions.