Director Of AI Engineering

Job Title: Director of AI EngineeringJob Description

The Director of AI Engineering leads the core intelligence organization that powers a next-generation hybrid AI platform and cross-device AI assistant. This role combines deep hands-on technical leadership with strategic vision to design and deliver the "AI brain" behind multimodal, agentic, and distributed AI experiences across millions of devices. The ideal leader operates as a true player-coach, setting technical direction, architecting complex systems, mentoring senior engineers, and driving high-impact AI products from concept to large-scale production.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the Core Intelligence organization responsible for agentic systems, orchestration, routing, tool frameworks, RAG retrieval, memory systems, knowledge graphs, and perception signals.
• Architect the intelligence layer for a hybrid AI platform, including on-device inference, cloud fallback, multi-model routing, policy enforcement, and context grounding to ensure reliable and secure AI behavior.
• Drive the development of perception-based triggers and wake-word detection logic, as well as screenshot and audio understanding pipelines, including OCR and ASR capabilities.
• Own the design and implementation of recommendation and next-action engines, partnering closely with experience engineering teams to deliver contextual, proactive AI experiences.
• Lead the optimization of small and medium AI models through techniques such as quantization, distillation, pruning, and device-specific tuning to achieve efficient on-device and cloud performance.
• Partner closely with platform engineering, cloud platform, SRE and delivery, and experience teams to ensure core intelligence services are performant, reliable, observable, and tightly integrated across the stack.
• Define and maintain evaluation frameworks and quality gates for intelligence features, including retrieval accuracy, hallucination avoidance, model grounding, and agent reliability.
• Set the technical direction and roadmap for the intelligence layer, balancing innovation, rapid prototyping, and production-grade reliability for large-scale deployments.
• Mentor and develop senior individual contributors across perception, agentic systems, RAG, memory, and model optimization, fostering a high-performing and collaborative engineering culture.
• Collaborate with research, product, and design teams to conceive, prototype, and launch new agent capabilities and multimodal AI experiences spanning devices and platforms.
• Own the architecture and delivery of agentic AI systems, LLM-based platforms, RAG architectures, memory systems, knowledge graphs, AI orchestration frameworks, and recommendation engines.
• Design and review large-scale distributed and cloud-native systems that support AI workloads and scale to large user and device bases.
• Review system designs, perform code reviews, and contribute hands-on to critical components to ensure technical excellence and maintainability.
• Lead the end-to-end lifecycle of AI products, from experimentation and model integration to deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement in production environments.
• Influence senior leadership and cross-functional engineering teams to align on AI strategy, priorities, and architectural decisions.
• Operate with a builder and startup mentality, driving clarity in ambiguous environments and pushing forward high-impact initiatives with speed and rigor.

Essential Skills

• At least 12+ years of software engineering experience with a strong background in building complex systems.
• At least 5+ years leading AI/ML engineering organizations or teams, including managing senior and principal engineers.
• Demonstrated experience managing engineers, architects, and AI teams in a high-impact environment.
• Hands-on coding background with the ability to remain deeply technical and actively contribute to codebases.
• Ability to pass a coding assessment, demonstrating strong programming and problem-solving skills.
• Proven experience building and deploying AI products into production at scale.
• Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native applications.
• Experience supporting platforms with large user or device bases, with a focus on performance and reliability.
• Strong system design and architecture skills, including designing end-to-end AI and data pipelines.
• Deep experience with Generative AI and production-grade LLM-based applications.
• Experience building agentic AI systems and AI agents that orchestrate tools, workflows, and context.
• Hands-on experience with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures.
• Experience with semantic search and related retrieval technologies.
• Experience with AI orchestration frameworks that manage multi-model routing, tools, and policies.
• Experience with multimodal AI, including combining text, audio, vision, and device signals.
• Experience with computer vision, OCR, and ASR pipelines for perception-based AI.
• Familiarity with reinforcement learning techniques applied to AI systems.
• Experience with knowledge graphs and their use in AI reasoning, context, and retrieval.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and mentor senior AI engineers while remaining hands-on and technically credible.
• Proven ability to influence senior leadership and cross-functional stakeholders on AI strategy and architecture.

Additional Skills & Qualifications

• Experience supporting millions of users or devices in production environments is preferred.
• background in applied AI and AI platforms, including integrating models into real-world products.
• Experience with AI platforms that span devices and cloud, including hybrid AI architectures.
• Comfort operating in a startup-like environment within a larger organization, with a builder and founder mindset.
• Player-coach leadership style, balancing strategic leadership with hands-on technical contributions.
• Comfort working in ambiguous environments and driving structure, prioritization, and execution.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with research, product, design, and platform teams to deliver end-to-end AI experiences.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain complex AI and system design concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience defining evaluation frameworks for AI systems, including metrics for retrieval accuracy, hallucination reduction, and model grounding.
• Demonstrated success in scaling AI platforms and services across multiple products or device lines.

Work Environment

This role operates in a primarily remote work environment within the United States, with an expectation of approximately 25% travel for collaboration, leadership meetings, and on-site sessions with cross-functional teams. The position sits within a large-scale, next-generation hybrid AI platform initiative that powers a cross-device AI assistant spanning multiple product lines and devices. You will work closely with platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, SRE and delivery, and experience engineering teams in a highly collaborative, distributed environment. The culture emphasizes a builder and startup mentality, offering substantial autonomy, executive visibility, and the ability to influence core AI strategy and architecture while benefiting from the resources and scale of a major enterprise. Work involves modern AI and distributed systems technologies, including generative AI, LLMs, agentic AI, RAG, multimodal AI, computer vision, OCR, ASR, reinforcement learning, knowledge graphs, and large-scale cloud-native infrastructure. The environment supports remote flexibility, high-impact responsibilities, and the opportunity to shape AI experiences across millions of devices worldwide.

Job Type & Location

This is a Permanent position based out of Chicago, IL.

Pay and Benefits

The pay range for this position is $475000.00 - $600000.00/yr.

Individual compensation offered for this position within this range will depend on many factors, including qualifications, skills, relevant experience, job knowledge, geographic location, internal equity, and other pertinent job-related factors.

This is not a typical Director role. Lenovo is effectively looking for a founder mentality leader who can help build the AI brain behind Quantum and Qira. You'll have the resources, funding, and scale of a Fortune 500 company while operating with much of the autonomy and influence typically found in a startup environment. The role offers remote flexibility, executive visibility, significant compensation ($475K-$600K total comp), and the chance to shape AI experiences across millions of Lenovo and Motorola devices worldwide. Lenovobenefits.com

Workplace Type

This is a fully remote position.

Application Deadline

This position is anticipated to close on Oct 15, 2026.

About Actalent

Actalent is a global leader in engineering and sciences services and talent solutions. We help visionary companies advance their engineering and science initiatives through access to specialized experts who drive scale, innovation and speed to market. With a network of almost 20,000 consultants and 5,000 clients across the U.S., Canada, Asia and Europe, Actalent serves many of the Fortune 500. We are proud to be an Engineering News-Record (ENR) Top 500 Design Firm for our engineering design services and a ClearlyRated Best of Staffing® winner for both client and talent service.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and will consider all applications without regard to race, sex, age, color, religion, national origin, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information or any characteristic protected by law.

If you would like to request a reasonable accommodation, such as the modification or adjustment of the job application process or interviewing process due to a disability, please email actalentaccommodation@actalentservices.com for other accommodation options.

San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, for all positions located in the city and county of San Francisco, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Massachusetts Lie Detector: It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI): We may use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support parts of our hiring process, including sourcing, screening, and evaluating candidates. AI helps assess applications and qualifications, but final decisions are made by our hiring team. By applying, you acknowledge and agree that your application may be reviewed using AI tools.