Head of AI Platform Engineering - Execution Plane

Guardian Life Insurance • New York, NY

7d • $152,290 - $250,195 • Hybrid

About The Position

As the Head of AI Platform Engineering – Execution Plane, you will lead the development and implementation of our enterprise platform’s execution layer including management of agentic AI workloads, model gateways, agent runtimes, tool/action gateways, MCP servers, orchestration frameworks, or AI execution engines. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and technology partners to develop and integrate automation solutions that drive business growth, improve customer experiences, and reduce operational costs.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, engineering, management or a related field.
• Strong people leadership experience managing software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing senior technical talent.
• Deep hands-on technical background designing, building, and operating production-grade distributed systems, AI/ML platforms, data platforms, or cloud-native runtime services.
• Experience leading teams responsible for the execution layer of a platform, including runtime services, model inference, retrieval, orchestration, tool invocation, workflow execution, or production AI operations.
• Strong understanding of data access patterns, enterprise APIs, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector/search systems, context engineering, and governed access to systems of record.
• Experience building reliable, scalable, low-latency execution services with clear contracts, strong observability, graceful degradation, retry patterns, rate limits, and operational resilience.
• Strong understanding of enterprise security and compliance requirements for runtime execution, including identity propagation, auditability, data handling, least privilege access, secrets management, and environment isolation.
• Strong communication and influence skills, with the ability to simplify complex runtime, data, and AI execution topics for senior stakeholders while aligning teams around reusable platform patterns.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States, without the need for employer sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with agentic AI systems, LLM platforms, model gateways, agent runtimes, tool/action gateways, MCP servers, orchestration frameworks, or AI execution engines.
• Experience with AWS-based AI execution services and cloud-native patterns, including Bedrock, AgentCore, SageMaker, Lambda, Step Functions, API Gateway, EKS, DynamoDB, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, and related DevOps tooling.
• Familiarity with RAG systems, enterprise search, vector databases, embedding models, rerankers, knowledge bases, context engineering, and governed retrieval from enterprise data sources.
• Experience designing multi-tenant runtime platforms with environment isolation, workload identities, RBAC/ABAC, cross-account access patterns, quotas, throttling, and secure service-to-service communication.
• Background in MLOps, LLMOps, AIOps, model lifecycle management, evaluation pipelines, model serving, inference optimization, or production AI operations.
• Experience with observability for AI workloads, including distributed tracing, token usage, latency, model/tool errors, cost attribution, quality metrics, safety metrics, and operational dashboards.
• Experience with performance, scalability, and cost optimization for high-volume runtime services, including caching, batching, streaming, load testing, capacity planning, and GPU/CPU optimization where applicable.
• Experience building reusable platform abstractions, SDKs, runtime adapters, reference architectures, or deployment templates that make execution technologies portable across vendors and use cases.
• Experience integrating enterprise tools, APIs, data services, and workflow systems through governed connectors rather than point-to-point application wiring.
• Comfort operating in a regulated, matrixed environment where production safety, auditability, resiliency, and vendor optionality are core design principles.

Responsibilities

• Lead the development and implementation of our enterprise platform’s execution layer including management of agentic AI workloads, model gateways, agent runtimes, tool/action gateways, MCP servers, orchestration frameworks, or AI execution engines.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and technology partners to develop and integrate automation solutions that drive business growth, improve customer experiences, and reduce operational costs.
• Own the roadmap and delivery for execution plane capabilities such as model gateways, agent runtimes, tool/action gateways, runtime adapters, MCP services, knowledge bases, retrieval pipelines, inference services, and deployment patterns.
• Drive engineering excellence through design reviews, architecture standards, testing, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, incident response, SLOs, runbooks, and production support mechanisms.
• Partner with control plane, developer experience, data engineering, security, architecture, operations, and domain application teams to ensure execution technologies operate behind governed platform interfaces.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Excellent medical, dental, supplemental health, life and vision coverage for you and your dependents with no wait period
• Life and disability insurance
• A great 401(k) with match
• Tuition assistance
• Paid parental leave
• Backup family care
• Flexible time off
• Flexible dress code
• Flexible work location policies

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior