Senior Director, AI Transformation and Developer Experience

Aptiv • USA Walnut Creek, CA

17h

About The Position

The Sr. Director, AI Transformation and Developer Experience is the operational owner of Wind River's AI-first engineering ambition — a senior leadership role inside the engineering organization, accountable for transforming how Wind River's 1000+ engineers design, build, test, ship, and operate software. You will architect and lead Wind River's AI Engineering Center of Excellence, driving the rollout of agentic systems and AI-augmented workflows that re-engineer the software development lifecycle and step-change engineering velocity across every product line. This is not a theoretical role. You will translate AI capability into measurable engineering outcomes — compressing release cycles, lifting developer productivity, raising code quality, and accelerating time-to-customer for VxWorks, Wind River Linux, Wind River Studio, and our cloud-native platforms. You will be the senior leader driving AI transformation inside engineering — chairing the engineering AI Steering Committee, partnering with engineering leadership across product groups, and driving buy-vs-build decisions across the foundation-model and developer-tooling landscape.

Requirements

• 15+ years of engineering leadership at scale, including 5+ years driving enterprise transformation initiatives in high-growth, large-scale, geographically distributed software organizations.
• Deep, hands-on AI fluency. Demonstrable experience architecting agentic systems, context engineering pipelines, and LLM-powered workflows — and a clear-eyed ability to separate AI hype from high-impact utility.
• Founder, CTO, or comparable hands-in-the-stack experience strongly preferred.
• Proven track record taking AI products from concept to production scale, with operating experience across hybrid cloud, modern MLOps frameworks, and the unit-economics realities of running LLM workloads in production.
• Demonstrated success leading large engineering organizations — 100+ engineers, multi-product, international — and accountable for delivering flagship products supporting hundreds of millions in revenue.
• Hands-on familiarity with AI-assisted development tooling (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, agent frameworks, eval platforms) and a point of view on how the modern SDLC must evolve as AI becomes a permanent layer in how software gets built.
• Engineering velocity and Agile transformation pedigree. Track record of compressing release cycles, lifting throughput, and rebuilding engineering operating models around test automation, team agency, and outcome-based prioritization.
• Senior leadership presence and engineering influence.Demonstrated ability to lead engineering steering committees, secure investment for technology bets, and translate complex technical strategy into measurable engineering outcomes for senior engineering leadership.
• Strong governance and responsible-AI instincts. Experience developing AI ethics, risk, and compliance frameworks — particularly in regulated or safety-critical environments where IP, code provenance, and data handling matter.
• Builder mentality with a "Customer Zero" mindset. Comfort operating from a blank page — establishing programs, recruiting talent, and shipping outcomes — and a track record of using a company's own technology internally to accelerate product feedback loops.
• Educational foundation combining deep technical training (CS, Computer Engineering, AI/ML, or related) with business judgment (MBA or equivalent operating experience) — you bring both the technologist's instinct and the operator's discipline.

Responsibilities

• Own the engineering AI transformation roadmap and lead the AI Engineering Center of Excellence.
• Define and execute Wind River's multi-year strategy for AI platforms, agentic capabilities, and developer tooling across the engineering organization — directly aligned with engineering velocity, quality, and time-to-customer targets.
• Chair the engineering AI Steering Committee that drives prioritization and investment with engineering leadership, and serve as the senior sponsor and internal thought leader who reinforces Wind River's position in the intelligent-systems era.
• Architect and drive the rollout of agentic systems for engineering operations.
• Partner with engineering operations leaders to re-engineer high-volume, high-friction workflows — build/release pipelines, CI/CD, test orchestration, defect triage, code review, on-call/incident response, telemetry analysis, and release management — into autonomous, self-driving systems that compress cycle time and lift throughput across 1000+ engineers.
• Lead the AI transformation of the software development lifecycle.
• Set the strategy for integrating AI into requirements, design, code, review, test, debug, and release — across product engineering, platform/infra, QA, DevOps/SRE, and release engineering — so AI becomes a permanent, measurable layer in how we ship.
• Partner with engineering leaders across product groups to drive hyper-automation and step-change improvements in developer productivity, code quality, and time-to-market for our embedded and cloud-native portfolios.
• Define and steward Wind River's Developer Experience Operating System.
• Define the standardized, opinionated AI-native operating model for the engineering organization — curated coding assistants (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot), agent runtimes, eval harnesses, prompt-as-code repositories, golden-path workflows, and observability — so 1000+ engineers solve the same problem the same way.
• Codify emerging AI best practices into shared primitives that eliminate per-team improvisation, close coverage gaps, and reduce friction across the SDLC.
• Set the strategy for token economics and the model portfolio.
• Establish unit economics on every AI engineering workflow — cost-per-task, model selection, intelligent routing, caching, fine-tuning vs. prompting, and inference-tier strategy — and drive buy-vs-build decisions across foundation models, hosting providers, and open-source stacks to maximize ROI at engineering scale.
• Stay ahead of the AI development curve.
• Continuously evaluate emerging models, agent protocols, evaluation frameworks, and SDLC patterns (evals-first, prompt-as-code, agentic CI/CD, AI-native Agile) — and translate the bets that matter into adoption playbooks for Wind River's engineering teams before the rest of the industry catches on.
• Champion an AI-first culture across the engineering organization.
• Lead the enablement, evangelism, and change-management agenda that lifts AI literacy across all 1000+ engineers — sponsoring engineering communities of practice, "Customer Zero" pilots, internal hackathons, and training programs that make AI fluency a baseline competency for every Wind River engineer.
• Establish AI engineering governance, IP, and responsible-use guardrails.
• Define and enforce policy and tooling for code provenance, data leakage prevention, model risk, license/IP exposure, and source-code handling — guardrails that are non-negotiable given Wind River's regulated automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, and telecommunications customer base.

Benefits

• Health and life insurance, income protection, and company-funded healthcare from the first day of employment, including vision and dental.
• Generous paid time off, including 25 days of annual holiday plus public holidays, and your birthday off.
• Wind Gives Back: five paid days each year to volunteer with not-for-profit community organizations.
• Pension plan with auto-enrollment, plus competitive equity participation.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed