Director, Artificial Intelligence

SI Group•The Woodlands, TX

14h

About The Position

The Director, Artificial Intelligence reports to the Chief Information Officer and leads SI Group’s responsible AI strategy. The role partners with functional leaders to identify business needs and opportunities, develop a strategic AI roadmap, and deliver solutions that improve employee productivity and manufacturing operations. It establishes and oversees AI governance, aligns AI initiatives with security and regulatory requirements, and measures the business value generated by AI and automation. This hands-on leadership position contributes directly to designing, developing, and deploying AI models and agents while advancing organization-wide training, adoption, and AI fluency. The Director leads the AI Transformation Office, sets enterprise standards and platforms, manages AI investments and vendor relationships, and guides a small senior team. The role also identifies and scales high-value AI capabilities across manufacturing, supply chain, commercial, R&D, and corporate functions, with rigorous measurement of benefits and EBITDA impact.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in data science, computer science, statistics, engineering, or equivalent experience.
At least 10 years of experience in data science and AI.
At least 5 years of team or program management experience.
Experience with Python, SQL, modern machine learning frameworks, and cloud ML platforms.

Nice To Haves

Manufacturing experience preferred.

Responsibilities

Set and maintain a multi-year AI strategy aligned with enterprise growth priorities, and present it to the executive leadership team.
Own AI policy, risk assessment, and model oversight, including privacy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, and validated manufacturing environments.
Partner with Master Data, Enterprise Applications, Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, and OT teams to enable AI access to ERP, CRM, MES, plant historian, and lab-system data.
Define reference architecture and standards for models, agents, and integrations, including the boundary between IT and OT.
Recruit, develop, and lead a small senior team; set clear outcomes for partners and service providers.
Own the AI budget, platform spending, and vendor contracts.
Partner with business leaders to redesign processes around AI rather than simply adding tools to existing processes.
Lead SI Group’s AI Transformation Office.
Own the roadmap, configuration, licensing, vendor relationships, and cost for each Everyday AI platform; decide which tools to standardize on or retire.
Build role-based training, a champions network, and a library of proven use cases for each function and region.
Enable business teams to build assistants and agents within approved platforms and standards for connections and automation.
Partner with Cybersecurity, Legal, and Data Governance on acceptable use, data classification, access controls, and prevention of unsanctioned AI tools.
Track active usage, license utilization, time returned, and employee satisfaction, and report results to the executive team.
Maintain an intake of employee ideas and feedback and advance the strongest ideas as candidates for differentiating capabilities.
Identify, size, and rank AI opportunities with leaders in Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Commercial, R&D, and corporate functions, and fund opportunities with real ROI.
Design, build, and deploy models and agents from prototype through production at scale across sites, independently and with the team.
Apply forecasting, optimization, anomaly detection, and predictive modeling to yield, quality, asset reliability, energy use, demand, and pricing.
Build agents that reason over company data and act within core systems, targeting multi-step work across areas such as sales, supply chain, formulation, manufacturing, customer service, and regulatory documentation.
Establish MLOps and LLMOps practices for evaluation, monitoring, drift detection, human oversight, cost control, and safe rollback.
Set baselines before each build, track benefits after go-live, and report EBITDA impact rigorously enough to withstand Finance and board review.
Select a responsible implementation route for each use case and ensure SI Group retains the capability and know-how that create competitive advantage.