Senior Mgr, AI & Digital Solution Delivery

JOB SUMMARY

The Senior Manager, AI & Digital Solution Delivery is responsible for helping to create, deploy, and maintain artificial intelligence solutions across Ecovyst. Reporting to the Senior Director, AI Transformation, the incumbent serves as the principal technical partner who owns solution delivery — defining architecture, engineering data, developing and validating models, and carrying solutions through production and ongoing support. While the Senior Director sets overall AI strategy and leads business engagement, this position translates that strategy into secure, sustainable, and measurable technical outcomes.

The ideal candidate brings a rare combination of deep technical expertise in AI/ML, agentic AI, automation solutions, and data engineering, paired with strong business acumen in B2B heavy industry. They will have a proven record of translating complex operational challenges into production-ready AI solutions that generate measurable enterprise value — including in areas such as Commercial Excellence, Plant Reliability, Operational Excellence, Supply Chain, and in general functions (HR, IT, Legal, Finance).

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

The following duties are representative of the position but are not intended to be all-inclusive:

• Solution Architecture & Design. Design end-to-end AI solutions, defining architecture, data connections, platforms, third-party integrations, and both front-end and back-end components; establish reusable reference architectures, templates, and pipelines maintained in a central repository.
• Security & Responsible AI. Incorporate cybersecurity, data-residency, least-privilege access, and privacy requirements by design; operate within Responsible AI guardrails and partner with IT/Security, Legal, and Privacy to meet enterprise governance and audit obligations.
• Data Engineering. Build and maintain data pipelines; query, aggregate, and join data from plant and enterprise systems — including process historian (PI), DCS/PLC, MES, SAP/ERP, and LIMS — to compile clean master data sets, and support foundational data-lake/lakehouse and SAP-integration work scoped to prioritized use cases.
• AI & Data Science Development. Develop, validate, and deploy models using machine learning, generative AI, statistical methods, and optimization/simulation techniques as appropriate; deliver predictive and root-cause solutions through operator- and business-facing applications with live-data back ends.
• Automation & Emerging Technology. Design and apply Robotic Process Automation (RPA), AI agents, and multi-agent solutions to eliminate manual, non-value-added work; integrate agents securely with enterprise data, applications, APIs, and tools; and define ownership, monitoring, governance, and maintenance models to keep solutions reliable and sustainable.
• Delivery & Project Management. Serve as the delivery function that takes approved, scoped work through execution, stakeholder engagement, user acceptance testing, and production hand-off, while business leaders retain overall accountability.
• Vendor & Partner Management. Select, direct, and manage third-party AI partners, consultants, and contractors; supplement internal capacity for defined project phases and hold vendors to Responsible AI standards.
• Team & Capability Building. Contribute to an enterprise AI Center of Excellence, help build and eventually lead an internal delivery team, and support enablement and upskilling across the organization.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering (Chemical, Mechanical, or Computer), Operations Research, or a related technical discipline.

• Minimum of seven (7) years of experience designing, building, and deploying data science or AI solutions, including demonstrated success carrying solutions through to production.
• Proficiency in Python and common data science libraries, together with strong SQL and data-engineering skills.
• Experience with cloud AI and data platforms — Microsoft Azure preferred, including Azure AI Foundry and/or Azure OpenAI — and modern MLOps practices.
• Demonstrated ability to select, direct, and manage third-party AI partners, consultants, and contractors.
• Strong project-management capability and the ability to lead through ambiguity within a lean, matrixed organization.
• Effective written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to convey technical concepts to non-technical audiences.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Master's degree (or higher) in a quantitative, engineering, or computational discipline preferred.
• Experience in an industrial or manufacturing environment (specialty chemicals, refining, or other asset-intensive operations).
• Familiarity with plant and enterprise data sources, including the OSIsoft/AVEVA PI process historian, DCS/PLC systems (e.g., DeltaV), MES, SAP/ERP, and LIMS.
• Hands-on experience designing and deploying AI agents and multi-agent systems, including Model Context Protocol (MCP), API-based integration, tool/function calling, agent orchestration, memory and retrieval patterns, identity and access controls, observability, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop governance; experience with RPA and establishing an AI Center of Excellence is also preferred.
• Mathematical optimization (LP, MILP, NLP), simulation, and digital-twin experience.
• Experience supporting Responsible AI governance in collaboration with Security, Legal, and Privacy functions.
• Project Management Professional (PMP) and/or Lean Six Sigma certification.

PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS AND WORKING CONDITIONS

• Hybrid work schedule based out of the Malvern, PA office
• Periodic travel (up to approximately 20%) to manufacturing sites, including Houston, TX, to observe processes and collaborate with plant personnel.
• May require obtaining a Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) for access to certain facilities.