Principal AI Domain Technical Leader

NTT DATA Services•Plano, TX

2d•$185,900 - $309,000

About The Position

As a Principal AI Domain Technical Leader, you will be the senior technical authority for one of North America AI Delivery's vertical portfolios: Products, Insurance, Banking and Financial Services, or Healthcare, Pharma, Life Sciences and SLED. Reporting to the AI Delivery Executive for the vertical, with a dotted line to the North America AI Delivery Technical Lead, you will own the technical answer on the portfolio's most strategic pursuits and transformations, provide technical assurance across its engagements, and build the reusable patterns the vertical's next engagement starts from. This is a billable technical leadership role. You will lead technically on two or three strategic client transformations at a time, standing in front of client CTOs, chief architects and engineering leaders alongside the AI Delivery Executive, and remaining accountable to the Engagement Leader for the engagement outcome. The balance of your time goes to pursuit shaping, architecture and engineering assurance, and the vertical's reference architectures, accelerators and deposits into the AI Studio Workflow Vault. You will not manage pod resources. The North America Technical Lead owns personnel leadership, the hiring bar and technical career development for onshore technical staff; your role is to mentor the vertical's architects and engineers through the work, set the technical bar on its engagements, and surface capability gaps and performance concerns to the Technical Lead.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in a technical discipline or equivalent professional experience.
12+ years in enterprise technology delivery, with 5+ years leading architecture or engineering on AI, data or platform transformations that reached production.
5+ years across cloud, data, and AI architecture, with recent hands-on exposure to GenAI/agentic architectures, MLOps/LLMOps, security, and responsible AI.
5+ years experience mentoring senior technical staff in a matrixed, globally distributed delivery organization.
Deep, current knowledge of the vertical: its systems of record, data landscape, regulatory and security requirements, and the technology partners that matter in it.
Demonstrated ownership of the technical solution on major pursuits: feasibility, architecture, estimation and technical risk, working alongside sales and delivery leadership.
Experience providing architecture and engineering assurance across multiple concurrent engagements, and leading technical recovery on at least one engagement in difficulty.
Track record of creating reusable patterns, reference architectures or accelerators that other teams adopted.
Credibility with client CTOs, chief architects and engineering leaders; able to explain a modern AI operating model in the industry's language.
Excellent written and verbal communication; able to say no to an unsound commitment with a better option attached.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with agentic AI, workflow orchestration, model gateways and evaluation frameworks in production.
Experience with outcome-based or managed-service delivery constructs where the technical solution carries commercial risk.
Contribution to a technical community or practice: standards, training, communities of practice, published patterns.
Familiarity with the AI Studio operating fabric, the Workflow Accelerator and the Workflow Vault, or comparable platform-based delivery models.
Experience across more than one of the target verticals.
Relevant architecture or cloud certifications (TOGAF, Azure, AWS, Google Cloud) or equivalent.

Responsibilities

Own the technical solution on the vertical's strategic pursuits: feasibility, architecture, delivery model, staffing shape, dependencies, technical risk and assumptions, validated with Global Demand & Solution Engineering before commitments are made.
Lead technically on two or three strategic transformations at a time as a billable member of the engagement, at the level of architecture, integration and technical risk.
Provide technical assurance across the vertical's engagements at the checkpoints that matter solution baseline, first production release, major scope change, and any engagement in difficulty; route findings through the Engagement Leader and AI Delivery Executive.
Lead technical remediation on engagements when needed, with the NA Technical Lead and Global Technical or COE specialists.
Own the vertical's reference architectures, reusable patterns and accelerators; deposit them in the Workflow Vault, keep them current and measure their adoption.
Represent the AI Studio operating fabric, its five-layer model and its technical standards to client technology leaders in the industry's own terms, including its regulatory, data, security and responsible-AI context.
Build and maintain the technical relationship with client CTOs, chief architects and engineering leaders alongside the AI Delivery Executive, before and outside escalations.
Serve as the first escalation point for Engagement Leaders on technical feasibility and architecture; decide what needs the NA Technical Lead.
Mentor the vertical's architects, engineers and data scientists; surface capability gaps and performance concerns to the NA Technical Lead.
Carry industry-specific requirements into the Global AI Studio standards conversation; apply the global standard in the vertical without creating variants.