Director, Software Engineering (AI Engineering Platform)
About The Position
The Director of Software Engineering owns the AI Engineering Platform, a core engineering domain within Platform Engineering. This leader is responsible for the strategy, roadmap, delivery, and operational health of platform capabilities that enable AI/ML and agentic workloads to be built, deployed, and run reliably across the enterprise. This role leads a multi-disciplinary engineering team, sets technical direction in partnership with Architecture, and drives adoption and outcomes in partnership with shared Delivery and Activation & Operations functions. It is a hands-on leadership role that balances people leadership, technical judgment, and cross-organizational influence, including managing critical dependencies on external teams.
Requirements
- Proven experience leading software engineering teams at a manager-of-managers or senior manager/director level, ideally within platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling organizations.
- Strong technical background in software engineering, with the ability to set architectural direction and earn the trust of senior engineers.
- Demonstrated ownership of a platform, product, or domain end to end — strategy through operations.
- Experience delivering AI/ML, data, or agentic platform capabilities, or closely adjacent large-scale distributed systems.
- Track record of managing complex cross-team dependencies and driving outcomes through influence rather than authority.
- Excellent communication skills with technical and executive stakeholders.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building internal platforms or developer-experience products with measurable adoption goals.
- Familiarity with MLOps, model serving, LLM/agent infrastructure, or AI developer tooling.
- Experience partnering with architecture and governance functions in a matrixed organization.
Responsibilities
- Define and continuously evolve the AI Engineering Platform strategy in alignment with Platform Engineering's goals.
- Translate ambiguous business and product needs into a clear, prioritized engineering roadmap and communicate it to leadership, peers, and stakeholders.
- Set technical direction for the domain in close partnership with the Architecture function.
- Ensure sound design, engineering quality, security, and scalability across the platform.
- Make and defend build-vs-buy and vendor decisions.
- Partner with the shared Delivery function to deliver commitments predictably.
- Manage cross-team dependencies, especially with the Agentic Platform, Data Platform, and Infrastructure teams, and proactively resolve blockers and escalations.
- Work with Activation & Operations to drive platform adoption, support internal customers, and improve the developer experience.
- Own the operational health, reliability, and cost-efficiency of the platform.
- Build, lead, coach, and grow a high-performing, multi-disciplinary engineering team.
- Hire and retain top talent, set clear expectations and career growth paths, and foster an inclusive, accountable, high-trust culture.
- Serve as the primary point of contact for the AI Engineering domain across Platform Engineering and with partner organizations.
- Communicate status, risks, and trade-offs clearly to both technical and executive audiences.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation
- Exciting career opportunity
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
