Director of AI Engineering, AI Labs

Via•New York, NY

4d•$275,000 - $325,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Via is launching AI Labs, an incubator-style team operating like a startup within the company, to expand its reach and provide cutting-edge technical solutions to cities in areas beyond transit. As Director of AI Engineering at Via, you will lead the AI Labs technical team, with a mandate to move fast, experiment boldly, and build AI-powered products that can fundamentally change how Via and its partner cities operate. This is a rare opportunity to be both a hands-on technical leader and a people leader, managing a small team of exceptional senior engineers while remaining deeply embedded in the work yourself. You will have real autonomy, direct access to leadership, and the backing of a company already at scale - without the constraints that usually come with it. If you've built AI products end-to-end and are energized by the idea of doing that in an entrepreneurial, fast-paced mode, with a blank canvas and a world-class team around you, this is the role for you.

Requirements

10+ years of hands-on experience building and shipping AI-powered products end-to-end, with deep expertise across the AI/ML stack - including LLMs, predictive modelling, and production data infrastructure.
Experienced in leading senior engineering talent - you know how to set a high bar, give direct feedback, and get the best out of people who are already excellent.
A strong backend engineer at your core - comfortable designing scalable APIs, working with distributed systems, and writing code that is clean, maintainable, and built to last.
Energized by ambiguity and early-stage environments - you create clarity for your team even when things are moving fast, and you take ownership without being asked.
A strong communicator and cross-functional collaborator - able to work fluidly with city partners, product leadership, and fellow engineers.
Comfortable with travel to collaborate on-site with partners and customers - being close to the user and problem is part of how you lead.

Responsibilities

Lead, develop, and inspire a small team of highly skilled AI engineers - setting technical direction, creating space for deep work, and building a culture of ownership, experimentation, and rigorous engineering from the ground up.
Own the engineering execution of the AI Labs roadmap - ensuring your team ships production-grade AI products reliably, from problem framing and data pipeline design through to deployment and iteration in live environments.
Stay hands-on - contributing directly to architecture decisions, backend systems, and the code that powers AI-driven features at scale.
Work closely with our customers in a forward-deployed manner to deeply understand problems and constraints and iterate quickly on scalable agentic solutions.
Lead technical scoping workshops, directly interfacing with city leaders to solve challenging local problems with agentic workflows.
Drive engineering across a varied roadmap - spanning data consolidation, predictive modelling, real-time decision-making, and LLM-powered experiences.
Collaborate directly with product, data science, and operations teams to identify and prioritize the highest-impact AI opportunities across the business.
Stay close to the frontier of AI development and bring new ideas, tools, and approaches into the team proactively.