Director, AI Engineering

Univar Solutions•Downers Grove, IL

3d•$200,000 - $250,000•Hybrid

About The Position

A Place Where People Matter. Start your career journey with Univar Solutions! Here you can make an impact on the world around you and accelerate your career in areas that energize and excite you. About the Role: The primary purpose of the Director, AI Engineering is to lead the team that designs, builds, and scales the AI-powered products and features our customers use every day. This is a hands-on leadership role: The Director sets the technical direction for AI architecture, model selection, evaluation, and inference across the product portfolio, while remaining close enough to the code and design reviews to make critical decisions firsthand. The role requires strong executive presence - translating ambiguous business goals into clear technical strategy, representing AI engineering to senior leadership and the board, and driving cross-functional alignment with Product, Research, Security, and Compliance. The Director owns the AI engineering roadmap, organizational design, and outcomes, ensuring the company can deliver AI features safely, responsibly, and at scale. The Director leads product-facing AI engineering, partnering closely with the VP of Data & AI, who oversees enterprise data strategy and the MLOps platform.

Requirements

10+ years in software engineering, with at least 5 years in engineering leadership roles
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience
Demonstrated track record shipping AI or ML products at scale, with real users, real revenue, and real operational consequences

Responsibilities

Own and drive the technical roadmap for AI engineering, leading a team of ~15 engineers delivering production AI features such as agents, copilots, and retrieval systems
Define architecture for next-generation, customer-facing AI products, including model selection and build-vs-buy decisions
Partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to translate AI capabilities into measurable customer value
Lead technical execution across LLM/agent systems, inference, and retrieval pipelines, ensuring scalable and reliable delivery
Establish engineering standards, tooling, and best practices for shipping AI features safely and at enterprise scale
Stay hands-on with design reviews and key technical decisions, unblocking teams and maintaining high quality
Build and grow a high-performing engineering team through strong hiring, mentorship, and leadership
Translate ambiguous business goals into clear technical strategy and represent AI engineering to senior leadership and the board