Director of AI Engineering

Job Title: Director of AI Engineering

Work Location: Arlington, VA (Onsite)

Long Term Contract

If you find this opportunity suitable, kindly share your updated resume. Also, please let me know a good time to connect with you for a quick discussion.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Job Description

Role: Build and lead AI Engineering function from the ground up. Set strategy, stand up infrastructure, hire the team, and deliver AI agents that analyze operational and commercial data to drive efficiency, revenue, and insight. This is a hands-on leader, not a pure people manager; in that you ll personally drive architecture and early builds until the team is staffed.

Required:

• 10+ years in software/data/ML engineering, including 3+ years leading technical teams
• Hands-on, current experience deploying production AI/ML systems at enterprise scale
• Direct experience with large language models. Specifically self-hosting open-weight models (not just calling commercial APIs) and serving optimization (quantization, inference optimization, GPU utilization)
• Experience designing and deploying agentic AI systems
• Experience with both cloud and on-premises GPU infrastructure
• Proven ability to hire and lead high-performing engineering teams
• Experience with infrastructure procurement / capacity planning / vendor management

Desired:

• Databricks experience
• Experience deploying AI/ML in or near operational technology (OT), industrial, or safety-critical environments
• Ontology / semantic modeling familiarity