Principal AI Delivery Lead

EBSCO•Remote,

21h•$197,300 - $281,860•Hybrid

About The Position

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is establishing a forward-deployed AI delivery capability within its Data & AI organization. This team will focus on transforming real business problems into production AI systems and handing them off to owning teams. The Principal AI Delivery Lead will be a player-coach responsible for setting technical direction for agentic AI systems, managing a delivery model from intake to hand-off, and building repeatable internal capabilities. This role involves leading a team of AI Engineers, partnering with business sponsors, and ensuring the successful deployment of AI solutions that improve speed, quality, and cost. The position offers the opportunity to join a new, executive-sponsored team with an existing backlog.

Requirements

10+ years in software, product, or AI delivery.
3+ years leading teams that shipped AI-powered production software.
Demonstrated ownership of production AI/ML or generative-AI systems end-to-end.
Hands-on fluency with modern agentic AI (LLM orchestration, RAG/vector search, human-in-the-loop, prompt engineering, agent evaluation).
Proven track record partnering with delivery and implementation teams to take enterprise use cases into production and hand them off cleanly.
Strong grounding in responsible AI, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails.
Ability to define “done” for a production agent.
Cloud-native experience (AWS preferred).
Comfortable setting architecture direction and earning the trust of engineers.
Player-coach mindset: ability to lead, manage, represent the team to executives, and be hands-on.
Excellent cross-functional communication skills, translating between executive sponsors, business stakeholders, and engineers.
Technical and business fluency.

Nice To Haves

Experience commercializing or productizing AI at scale (hyperscaler marketplace launches, ARR ownership, platform productization).
Cost-optimization depth (small language models, fine-tuning, prompt caching, token-economics modeling).
Background in information services, publishing, or other content-rich enterprises.
Experience standing up a new team or capability from the ground up.
Relevant certifications (cloud ML/AI engineering, SAFe, PMP).

Responsibilities

Lead the Forward-Deployed Engineering pod, owning outcomes, the delivery roadmap, and team growth and performance.
Run the operating model, including scoring inbound demand, time-boxing engagements, and enforcing clean hand-offs.
Set technical direction for production agentic systems, including orchestration, RAG/enterprise search, human-in-the-loop, and governed tool/data access.
Establish delivery foundations such as an evaluation harness, responsible-AI guardrails, LLM observability, and a reusable pattern catalog.
Own cost-to-serve through model selection, small-language-model migration, prompt caching, and token economics.
Partner with business sponsors to convert use cases into shipped and adopted systems.
Work with strategic delivery vendors while protecting EBSCO IP.
Instrument and report impact on a Speed/Quality/Cost/Learning scorecard to senior leadership.
Scale the capability by maturing the pod and seeding a champion network.