Executive Director, AI Gateway Service

RGA•Creve Coeur, MO

6d•Hybrid

About The Position

The AI Gateway Service Owner serves as the steward of the service, accountable for its strategy, financial performance, OKR attainment, OLA/SLA compliance, governance, and continuous business value realization. The AI Gateway Service Owner is accountable end-to-end for the enterprise AI Gateway — from architecture through build, launch, and ongoing operation. This is a hybrid technical/operational leadership role: hands-on enough to make and defend architecture decisions, disciplined enough to run the gateway as a production service with SLAs, and strategic enough to build the team and roadmap that scale it across the enterprise.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree in Arts/Sciences (BA/BS) or equivalent experience - Required
8+ years in platform/infrastructure engineering, with 3+ years owning a production service end-to-end - Required
5+ years people management and team leadership experience - Required
Demonstrated experience architecting and operating API gateways, service meshes, or similar middleware at enterprise scale - Required
Working knowledge of LLM/AI infrastructure (model routing, inference platforms, prompt/token management, AI security concerns) - Required
Track record building and leading technical teams - Required
Fluency translating technical tradeoffs into business risk and OKRs for executive audiences - Required
Experience supporting a global, multi-region service footprint with region-specific compliance obligations - Required

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in Arts/Sciences (MA/MS) and/or LOMA certification - Preferred
Experience with zero-trust architecture and enterprise AI governance frameworks - Preferred
Familiarity with CI/CD platforms, artifact registries, and on-prem AI inference deployment - Preferred
Background in cyber risk quantification or security engineering - Preferred
Hands-on implementation experience with one or more leading AI gateway platforms: Kong AI Gateway, Portkey, LiteLLM, Noma Security, Cloudflare AI Gateway, AWS Bedrock Gateway / Azure AI Gateway - Preferred

Responsibilities

AI Gateway Service Owner leads the end-to-end architecture, delivery, and operation of the AI Gateway, defining secure, scalable patterns for LLM traffic management, integrating with enterprise platforms, and guiding implementation through reusable standards and engineering oversight.
The role is accountable for running the gateway as a production service, ensuring reliability, security, performance, cost efficiency, and adoption through well-governed operational practices and support models.
Lead multiple complex projects and initiatives; manages related teams, sets organizational priorities, and allocates resources
Develop and maintain effective business relationships, coordinating service delivery in line with negotiated Service Commitments.
Collaborate with business partners to ensure properly defined and communicated project requests.
Maintain current knowledge of industry practices, trends and applications.
Perform other duties as assigned.