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)
• 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

Consistent with the firm’s hybrid work model, this position will require in-person attendance at least two days a week either at a Grant Thornton office or at a client site.

Pay

The base salary range for this position is between $170,568 and $274,554. Placement within the pay range is at Grant Thornton’s discretion, and it is based on multiple factors, including but not limited to, job-related knowledge/skills, experience, business needs, progression within the role, geographic location, and internal equity.

Schedule

Consistent with the firm's hybrid work model, this position will require in-person attendance at least two days a week, either at a GT office or client site.