AI, Data & Technology - AI-ML Director

About the role

Grant Thornton US is building a market-leading AI practice focused on practical, secure, and scalable outcomes for our clients. We are hiring AI/ML Solution Architects to lead discovery phase through production delivery.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery workshops to clarify business objectives, constraints, and measurable success criteria for AI/ML initiatives
• Translate requirements into end-to-end target-state architectures across data, ML/AI, application integration, security, and governance
• Define pragmatic tradeoffs across accuracy, latency, cost, reliability, privacy, and risk—and communicate decisions to exec and engineering audiences
• Design the data + model lifecycle (pipelines, training/finetuning, serving, monitoring, drift detection, retraining) and the required MLOps/LLMOps foundations
• Establish integration patterns with enterprise systems (APIs/events/workflows, IAM, observability) so solutions are operable and supportable in production
• Partner with security, privacy, and risk teams to embed controls (access, auditability, data handling, responsible AI) into solution designs
• Produce core delivery artifacts (architecture diagrams, reference patterns, implementation roadmap, runbooks) and drive architecture reviews
• Mentor teams and build reusable assets/accelerators (reference architectures, templates, evaluation scorecards) to scale repeatable delivery quality

Requirements

The ideal candidate brings the right blend of hands-on AI engineering credibility and consulting leadership—strong communication with executives and technical teams, experience designing AI solutions that integrate with enterprise systems, and a pragmatic approach to tradeoffs across accuracy, cost, latency, reliability, and risk—along with the ability to mentor teams and shape repeatable assets and accelerators.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree preferably in data science or computer science or related discipline
• For managers, minimum five years of hands-on developer experience in machine learning and artificial intelligence stacks
• For Directors, at least two years of experience leading teams of AI/ML architects and developers
• Demonstrated experience designing and delivering production AI/ML solutions in an enterprise environment
• Strong grounding in cloud architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP), distributed systems, and modern data platforms
• Experience with MLOps practices (model lifecycle, monitoring, governance, deployment automation)
• Experience partnering with security/risk to implement privacy, access controls, auditability, and responsible AI practices
• Able to lead senior client stakeholders through decisions under ambiguity
• Experience to develop long-standing relationships with clients
• Experience leading AI/ML delivery programs
• Experience with AI patterns (RAG, agentic, etc.)
• Prior experience in regulated environments (SOX, HIPAA, PCI, model risk management) is preferred
• Experience leading proposal solutioning / estimates / technical writing for pursuits
• Experience mentoring junior or senior colleagues in AI/ML architectures
• Experience guiding clients on build vs. buy decisions of AI/ML powered use cases

Skills

• Flexible, adaptable and an eager self-starter
• Fluent spoken and written communications skills
• Prior consulting industry experience or prior experience in an internal consulting role
• Consistently eligible to work in the United States

Benefits

At Grant Thornton, we offer a competitive base salary range between $170,568 and $274,554, with placement within the range at Grant Thornton’s discretion. Benefits include medical, dental, and vision insurance, an employee assistance program, paid sick leave, and participation in the firm’s 401(k) savings plan and employee retirement plan. We also offer a discretionary, annual bonus based on individual and firm performance.

Pay

The base salary range for this position is between $170,568 and $274,554.

Schedule

This role requires in-person attendance at least two days a week either at a Grant Thornton office or at a client site.