Senior Director, Head of Application Engineering and Productionization

Role Summary

The AI Acceleration (AIA) function within the Chief Marketing Office (CMO) leads design, delivery, and scale-up of priority AI capabilities across Commercial. The role designs, builds, and scales enterprise applications and AI/ML solutions, partnering with Platform Ops to deliver production-grade deployments.

Responsibilities

• Strategy & architecture: Define the overall strategy and governance for application engineering and productionization, establishing frameworks, patterns, and standards for how AI and digital products are built, deployed, and maintained.
• Strategy & architecture: Align on architectural decisions for front-end, full-stack, cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP), and CI/CD pipelines to ensure scalability, performance, and security.
• Strategy & architecture: Partner with Heads of Agent Product Management, Full Stack Development, Data Engineering, and Data Strategy to maintain consistent architecture, shared infrastructure, and unified engineering standards across AIA.
• Build & ship (governance level): Oversee the design, development, and rollout of applications and tools across AIA pods, focusing on reuse and maintainability.
• Build & ship (governance level): Lead front-end and full-stack development teams in implementing secure, scalable interfaces and integrations with enterprise systems and APIs.
• Build & ship (governance level): Establish, govern and align to CI/CD pipelines, release management, and environment configuration for applications and maintain alignment with security and quality standards.
• Build & ship (governance level): Collaborate with agent and AI/ML engineering teams to move AI/ML models into production with strong deployment, versioning, and monitoring practices.
• Quality & reliability: Define quality standards and performance metrics for applications covering uptime, latency, reliability, and user experience.
• Quality & reliability: Oversee the implementation of automated testing, logging, and observability platforms to ensure operational excellence.
• Quality & reliability: Establish mechanisms for proactive issue detection, incident response, and continuous improvement of application stability and security.
• Team & culture: Build and lead a high-performing engineering organization (~30 FTEs) across front-end, full-stack, DevOps, and architecture disciplines.
• Team & culture: Set strong technical direction, review design and code, and mentor senior engineers and engineering managers to raise the organizational engineering bar.
• Team & culture: Foster a culture of technical excellence, accountability, and continuous learning, emphasizing reusable components, automation, and engineering rigor.
• Cross-functional impact: Partner with Data Engineering, Product, Agent Product Management, and Platform Ops teams to ensure seamless integration of applications with data pipelines, APIs, and orchestration frameworks.
• Cross-functional impact: Work with the Data Strategy & Performance team to align engineering practices with enterprise governance, security, and compliance requirements.
• Cross-functional impact: Maintain close feedback loops with users and stakeholders to shape application roadmaps based on adoption, performance, and business impact.
• Cross-functional impact: Communicate technical decisions, trade-offs, and implications clearly to senior leadership, connecting architecture and engineering choices to business outcomes.
• Innovation & best practices: Promote adoption of modern software development methodologies and tooling, including agile delivery, DevOps, and continuous delivery frameworks.
• Innovation & best practices: Stay current on emerging trends in application engineering, AI integration, and cloud infrastructure, applying these insights to strengthen engineering practices and drive innovation.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field required; Master’s degree strongly preferred.
• 12+ years of relevant professional experience.
• Proven people‑leadership experience, with a track record of building and developing high‑performing teams.
• Experience working within regulated industries (e.g., pharmaceuticals, banking, insurance).
• Demonstrated ability to navigate and influence within large, complex organizations.
• Strong stakeholder‑management capabilities, with success driving alignment across diverse functions and seniority levels.
• Recognized industry thought leader with enterprise‑wide strategic impact.
• Demonstrated program and operations management expertise, particularly within large, regulated environments.
• Proven success managing quality standards, leading efficient development teams, and optimizing complex staffing and resource allocation models.
• Deep expertise in cross‑functional integration and operational effectiveness within a large corporate ecosystem.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; Master’s degree strongly preferred.

Additional Requirements

• Ability to travel based on business needs.
• This position is hybrid and requires onsite work 2 to 3 days per week.