Associate Director, AI Foundations Engineering (3 openings)

About the role

The Associate Director, AI Foundations Engineering leads the engineering strategy, design, development, deployment and ongoing optimization of the organization's agentic AI platform and solutions. The role builds scalable, secure and reliable AI-driven systems that turn existing products, processes and workflows into intelligent, agentic AI experiences, partnering with product, data, architecture, security and business teams. There are 3 positions available, based remotely anywhere in the U.S. (some locations may be restricted by legal entity); relocation is not provided.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design and engineering delivery of the agentic AI platform and related solutions.
• Drive the transformation of existing products, processes and workflows into scalable agentic AI capabilities.
• Oversee end-to-end AI engineering operations, including development, deployment, monitoring, reliability and continuous improvement.
• Partner with stakeholders to define technical roadmaps, platform standards and solution priorities aligned to business goals.
• Establish engineering best practices for performance, scalability, security, governance and maintainability.
• Guide the evaluation, integration and optimization of AI models, orchestration frameworks and platform components.
• Build, mentor and lead engineering teams, and identify ways to accelerate value through reusable AI services, automation and efficiency.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; an advanced degree is a plus.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 1-2 years building applications on large language models, with at least one agentic system deployed beyond a demo.
• Ability to take an ambiguous business problem to a working prototype quickly, then harden it for real users with security, guardrails, error handling and CI/CD.
• Clear communication of technical tradeoffs to product and business partners, and comfort in a small, fast-moving team.

Required skills

• Hands-on experience building AI agents on AWS, including Amazon Bedrock (models, Agents, Knowledge Bases, Guardrails) and Bedrock AgentCore or comparable approaches.
• Proficiency with at least one agent framework such as Strands Agents, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, CrewAI or a custom orchestration layer.
• Strong Python skills and experience with Lambda, Step Functions, ECS/EKS, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3 and IAM.
• Experience with RAG, including chunking, embeddings and vector stores (OpenSearch, pgvector or similar).
• Experience designing tool use and function calling; familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) is preferred.
• Evaluation and observability: test sets, LLM-as-judge or human review loops, tracing (CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, LangSmith) and cost/latency monitoring.

What we offer

• Expected salary range of $145,600 to $270,400 per year, with a performance-based cash incentive and possible annual equity awards.
• Benefits package including health, life and disability coverage, a 401(k) with company contribution and match, and a time-off package including vacation, personal days and holidays.