Senior Director Engineering, Applied AI

A+E Networks • New York, NY

3d • Remote

About The Position

THE ROLE: Senior Director of Engineering, Applied AI A+E Global Media is seeking a strategic and hands-on Senior Director of Engineering, Applied AI to lead the design, development, and delivery of AI-driven capabilities across our technology platforms. Reporting directly to the VP of Engineering, you will play a critical role in scaling our applied AI and generative AI initiatives while collaborating with product, data, and business teams to bring next-generation media experiences to life. You will serve as a central technical leader, coordinating across multiple teams — including Data Engineering, Data Science, Product Management, Software Engineering, and Creative AI — to drive innovation, ensure delivery excellence, and align AI capabilities with business goals. This is a unique opportunity to found and shape A+E Global Media’s Applied AI engineering function from the ground up. You’ll be the first dedicated Applied AI leader on the team, with the autonomy to define the vision, build a team of consultants, and lay the technical and cultural foundation for our Applied AI strategy moving forward.

Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience including team leadership experience
• Significant recent focus on application AI technologies including , including experience applying LLM models or systems to real-world products and workflows.
• Proven track record of building and scaling engineering teams in a production AI environment.
• Experience working with Embeddings, RAG, RLFH, Fine Tuning etc at enterprise scale
• Experience with Python and/or Typescript/Javascript
• Experience designing or applying evals LLM models (LLMs), including prompt testing, grounding, hallucination detection, and performance benchmarking.
• Excellent communication skills and experience working on cross-functional initiatives.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working with large-scale data in Adtech or Advertising-related platforms is a plus.
• Experience with Snowflake, Databricks, or similar systems is a plus.
• Experience with AI frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face) and deploying models to cloud environments is a plus
• Experience with data pipelines and integration patterns is a plus including MLOps
• Hands-on experience implementing RAG architectures at scale and/or fine-tuning large language models.
• Experience with diffusion/image/video models is a nice to have
• Exposure to creative pipelines or AI-enhanced content workflows is a plus
• Background in statistical modeling or mathematics is a plus.
• Familiarity with data privacy, copyright, and ethical issues in applied AI applications is helpful but not needed
• Experience in the media, entertainment, or content-tech industry is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Applied AI Strategy & Execution Drive the technical roadmap for applied AI across key product and business areas, including content intelligence, personalization, automation, and creative tooling.
• Partner with the VP of Engineering and peers to define how AI integrates into A+E Global Media’s broader technology and product vision.
• Evaluate and implement cutting-edge AI techniques, including GenAI, LLMs, vision models, and recommendation systems.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and vendors to ensure the team remains at the forefront of innovation and leverages the best available tools for impact and scale.
• Drive development of custom AI solutions using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and model fine-tuning to meet business-specific needs across media, creative workflows, and internal business operations, including defining evals and benchmarks to ensure performance, grounding, and reliability.
• Design and lead systems that extract value from large, unstructured content sets — including PDFs, SharePoint documents, and multimedia assets (video, audio, image) — leveraging a combination of NLP, computer vision, multimodal models, LLMs, RAG, RLHF, and enterprise-scale retrieval techniques.
• Drive the thoughtful adoption of AI-powered tools within engineering to enhance developer productivity, model experimentation, and operational efficiency.
• Team Leadership Build the Applied AI engineering function from scratch — defining the team’s structure, hiring its first members, and establishing best practices and a strong technical culture from day one.
• Lead and mentor a growing team of engineers focused on applied AI systems, including full-stack AI, MLOps, and platform integrations.
• Cultivate a culture of experimentation, engineering rigor, and inclusive collaboration.
• Attract and retain top talent while supporting ongoing professional development.
• Delivery & Cross-Functional Collaboration Oversee the full lifecycle of applied AI systems, including model integration and orchestration — from prototyping and data exploration to deployment, monitoring, and retraining.
• Collaborate with Data Engineering and Data Science teams to ensure robust data pipelines and experimentation workflows.
• Partner with Product teams to co-develop AI-enabled features and prioritize high-impact initiatives.
• Work closely with other internal A+E Engineering teams to embed applied AI into production systems.
• Serve as a key technical counterpart to the Creative Generative AI teams, enabling media and video generation capabilities.
• Operational Excellence Ensure engineering excellence across performance, scalability, monitoring, and AI system reliability and governance.
• Build and maintain scalable, cloud-based AI infrastructure.
• Champion responsible AI development aligned with privacy, IP, and ethical standards.

Benefits

• A+E offers a competitive total compensation package, which includes healthcare coverage, 401k matching, and a range of other benefits.
• Learn more at www.aegm.com/careers.

What This Job Offers

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