Director, AI Strategy

About the role

Publicis Groupe is hiring a Director, AI Strategy in New York. The role owns the technical architecture and hands-on build of AI agent and skill systems on the platform, turning complex business processes into scalable, production-grade AI engineering solutions. It sits at the intersection of deep technical execution and cross-functional leadership, guiding engineers through the design, development and delivery of AI-native systems while setting the technical standards the wider organization builds against.

Key responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical design of vertical-specific AI systems, translating business needs into scalable AI workflows, model integrations and new engineering builds.
• Lead the hands-on design, development and delivery of AI-native platform capabilities, from agent orchestration and retrieval pipelines to evaluation and monitoring frameworks.
• Set the technical approach for adapting existing engineering capabilities or architecting bespoke solutions to complex client and platform problems.
• Work with Product, Strategy, Data Science and Delivery to scope, price, structure and prioritize technical proposals and engineering initiatives.
• Present technical architecture and live demos that map business challenges to engineering solutions.
• Own the full software development lifecycle for AI systems, from design and prototyping through deployment, monitoring and iteration.
• Serve as the senior technical voice in platform roadmap discussions, translating engineering feasibility and trade-offs into product direction and investment recommendations.
• Mentor engineers and lead them through complex AI system design, debugging and architectural decisions.
• Troubleshoot, debug and optimize AI/ML systems and pipelines to improve performance, reliability and cost efficiency.
• Develop internal enablement materials and technical narratives for teams building and pitching AI solutions.

Required profile

• 8-12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a recent focus on AI/ML systems (LLMs, agents, RAG or applied AI platforms).
• Proven track record architecting and shipping production-grade AI-native systems at scale.
• Experience leading and developing engineering teams across co-located and virtual environments.
• Background in marketing technology, media data or adjacent verticals.
• Experience building AI agent frameworks, tool/skill orchestration systems or multi-agent architectures, and hands-on work with vector databases, embeddings and RAG pipelines.
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation, fine-tuning or prompt engineering at scale; experience leading executive-facing technical demos or proof-of-concept work.
• Active contributions to open-source AI/ML projects or a strong developer-community presence.

Required skills

• Languages such as Python, Java or TypeScript, and AI engineering frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, PyTorch or similar.
• Cloud environments (AWS, Azure or GCP) and modern data/ML infrastructure.
• Version control, testing, CI/CD and observability.
• Microservices architecture and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).

What we offer

• Pay range of USD 135,375 to 216,684 per year, depending on skills, qualifications and experience.
• Medical coverage, dental, vision, disability, 401K and paid time off.
• Parental and family care leave, family forming assistance and tuition reimbursement.