AI Director

**This is a direct hire for one of our clients. This role is fully remote. Eligible candidates must be authorized to work in the US without visa sponsorship.** Our client is putting AI at the center of its product strategy and is seeking an experienced AI Director to lead the architecture, roadmap, and delivery of customer-facing AI capabilities across its SaaS platform portfolio. This is a hands-on leadership role that combines AI strategy, software architecture, and team leadership. The ideal candidate has designed and delivered production AI solutions, led technical direction for AI initiatives, and remains actively involved in architecture, prototyping, and software development. You will guide a growing AI team while driving next-generation capabilities including agentic systems, personalization, MCP initiatives, and AI-powered product innovation. Responsibilities AI Strategy & Architecture Own the architecture and technical direction for AI capabilities across our client's product portfolio. Define roadmaps for current AI initiatives and next-generation AI systems. Design scalable agentic workflows, personalization capabilities, and AI-driven customer experiences. Establish architecture standards for memory, context management, prompts, evaluation frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), knowledge representation, ontologies, and reusable AI patterns. Lead AI integration efforts across .NET, Node, Go, and Java platforms. Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, and AI infrastructure solutions. Hands-On Technical Leadership Remain actively involved in architecture, prototyping, and software development. Develop reference implementations and guide technical decisions through hands-on leadership. Lead build-versus-buy decisions regarding AI platforms, frameworks, and infrastructure. Partner with Platform Engineering on AI infrastructure, evaluation systems, runtime environments, and governance. Serve as a trusted advisor to engineering leadership on AI strategy and long-term technical direction. Team Leadership Lead and mentor the existing AI team, including engineers and contractors. Foster technical excellence through design reviews, coaching, and architectural guidance. Collaborate closely with engineering leaders, product teams, and stakeholders across the organization. Support broader product engineering teams adopting AI capabilities. Innovation & Growth Explore and deliver new AI use cases, products, and greenfield opportunities. Lead initiatives involving agent harnesses, personalized content generation, and future MCP implementations. Participate in technical due diligence and AI capability assessments for potential acquisitions. Identify practical AI opportunities that create measurable business value. Governance & Compliance Establish best practices for AI governance, model selection, hosting strategy, tenant isolation, and data privacy. Partner with Legal, Information Security, and IT teams to support enterprise AI requirements. Ensure AI solutions align with security, compliance, and regulatory expectations. Qualifications 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant architecture and technical leadership responsibilities. Proven experience designing, deploying, and scaling production AI, machine learning, RAG, or agentic systems. Deep understanding of modern AI architecture, including LLM applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), memory, context management, evaluation frameworks, knowledge graphs, ontologies, and other AI/ML techniques. Strong hands-on software engineering background with the ability to remain actively involved in development. Experience leading technical strategy, architecture decisions, and AI roadmaps. Ability to work across multiple technology stacks and integrate AI capabilities into existing platforms. Strong communication and collaboration skills with technical and executive stakeholders. Experience leading teams while maintaining direct technical contribution. Comfortable operating in fast-paced, evolving SaaS environments. Nice to Have Skills Experience with agentic AI, agent orchestration, agent harnesses, and MCP initiatives. Experience designing AI systems leveraging knowledge graphs, ontologies, semantic search, graph databases, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures. Experience working with graph databases, vector databases, knowledge representation frameworks, and semantic data models supporting AI applications. Experience with Python, Node.js, or TypeScript. AWS and AWS Bedrock experience. Experience with evaluation platforms such as Braintrust, LangSmith, LangFuse, or similar tools. Background as a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Architect, consultant, startup leader, or innovation lab contributor. Experience conducting technical due diligence or evaluating acquisition targets. Financial services, wealth management, insurance, or other regulated industry experience. Experience supporting AI initiatives within high-growth or private-equity-backed SaaS organizations. Our Vetting Process At Emergent Staffing, we work hard to find the best tech candidates capable of developing high quality results for our clients. Here are the steps of our vetting process for this position: Application (5 minutes) Online Assessment (40-60 minutes) Initial Phone Interview (30-45 minutes) Virtual Interview with Hiring Manager (30-45 minutes) Final Client Interview (60-90 minutes) Job Offer! #EmergentStaffing #IND22