Director, AI Engineering & Platform

Job Director, AI Engineering & Platform Description Company As the world’s leading multidisciplinary service provider, Deluxe underpins the media and entertainment industry, servicing content creators and distributors including Netflix, WarnerMedia, The Walt Disney Company, Amazon, Apple, Viacom, NBCU, Google, AT&T and many others, by providing Global Content Distribution, Localization, Accessibility and Mastering while leading end-to-end innovation with unparalleled scale and agility across the Streaming, Theatrical, Broadcast and Mobile landscapes. With headquarters in Los Angeles and offices around the globe, the company employs over 3,500 of the most talented and experienced industry individuals worldwide. For more information, please visit www.bydeluxe.com Location: Aachen, Germany (Hybrid) Position Overview Deluxe is building a new AI Engineering & Platform team in Aachen, Germany to support the next generation of AI-powered media, localization, automation, and workflow capabilities. The Director, AI Engineering & Platform will lead this team and will be responsible for building, operating, and evolving the technical foundation for production AI services across Deluxe. This is a senior hands-on leadership role for someone who can build and run a high-performing engineering team, deliver complex AI platform and integration projects, and provide technical direction across cloud infrastructure, model deployment, AI services, agentic workflows, and production operations. The role will lead a hybrid engineering team based primarily in Aachen while also managing and collaborating with engineers in other Deluxe locations, including the United States. In addition to leading delivery and operations, this person will continuously evaluate emerging AI technologies, model providers, open-source frameworks, agentic workflow patterns, and industry capabilities. They will be expected to make clear recommendations on where Deluxe should build, buy, partner, or integrate in order to improve speed, quality, cost, automation, and product differentiation. RESPONSIBILITIES: Build, lead, mentor, and develop a distributed AI engineering team across Aachen and other Deluxe locations. Own technical delivery for AI platform, model-serving, workflow automation, and applied AI engineering initiatives. Establish engineering standards, operating rhythms, delivery practices, documentation expectations, and technical review processes. Partner with U.S. and European stakeholders across engineering, product, operations, localization, media workflows, and business leadership. Lead architecture and execution for scalable AI services, including inference platforms, training environments, deployment pipelines, observability, and operational support. Guide teams responsible for cloud infrastructure, DevOps, AI platform operations, applied AI engineering, and model integration. Evaluate internal and external AI technologies, including commercial models, open-source models, agentic frameworks, orchestration tools, and vendor platforms. Recommend when Deluxe should build, buy, partner, or integrate with third-party AI capabilities. Ensure AI systems are reliable, secure, maintainable, cost-conscious, and aligned with production business needs. Drive continuous improvement across AI engineering practices, including automation, CI/CD, monitoring, quality evaluation, testing, and release management. Support adoption of AI capabilities across Deluxe applications and workflows through reusable platforms, services, APIs, and technical patterns. Create clarity around priorities, risks, technical tradeoffs, delivery timelines, and resourcing needs. Ensure the team can operate production AI systems independently through strong documentation, runbooks, monitoring, incident response, and knowledge sharing. QUALIFICATIONS: Significant experience leading engineering teams responsible for cloud platforms, AI/ML systems, data platforms, workflow automation, or production software systems. Demonstrated ability to build and manage distributed teams across locations and time zones. Strong technical background in cloud architecture, software engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or AI/ML engineering. Experience delivering production systems that require reliability, monitoring, automation, security, and operational ownership. Strong understanding of modern AI architectures, model-serving patterns, APIs, data pipelines, and applied AI integration. Ability to evaluate technical options, make pragmatic recommendations, and communicate tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical audiences. Experience working with cloud platforms, preferably AWS. Experience leading complex technical programs from planning through production deployment and ongoing operations. Strong written and verbal communication skills. Ability to work effectively with U.S.-based leadership while operating independently from Germany. PREFERRED EXPERIENCE: Experience with AI/ML platforms, MLOps, model deployment, inference services, or production machine learning systems. Experience with agentic workflows, LLM orchestration, model evaluation, RAG patterns, or AI-enabled automation platforms. Experience with speech, language, localization, dubbing, media workflows, ASR, MT, TTS, or content-processing systems. Experience evaluating commercial and open-source AI models or vendor platforms. Experience with GPU infrastructure, distributed training, Slurm/HPC, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, or similar infrastructure technologies. Experience in media, entertainment, localization, post-production, or content supply chain environments.