AI Infrastructure Director

What You'll Own

• AI Infrastructure Ownership: All AI environments, including on-premise GPU clusters, Azure AI and ML services, and shared AI platform components. Accountability for reliability, scalability, and lifecycle management.
• Azure AI Platform Leadership: Own Azure environments hosting AI and automation workloads, including shared services such as Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Search, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• Cross-Team Partnership: Collaborate with Cloud Engineering on landing zones, networking, subscription governance, and service onboarding. Partner with AI Engineering on shared platforms and operating standards.
• Innovation Enablement: Create secure, governed environments that enable rapid experimentation and development for the firm's AI engineering and innovation teams.
• Team Leadership: Lead a multi-disciplinary engineering organization spanning AI Infrastructure, AI Platform Engineering, Azure AI Operations, and Microsoft 365 Automation. Mentor leaders and engineers and build sustainable career paths.
• Platform Design & Delivery: Oversee the design and deployment of shared and custom AI platforms that accelerate solution delivery while meeting security and governance standards.
• Security & Responsible AI: Operationalize governance, privacy, and Responsible AI standards in partnership with Risk, Security, and Responsible AI teams.
• Operational Excellence: Ensure platform reliability, service-level objectives, incident response readiness, and continuous improvement across production AI environments.
• Strategic Planning & Vendor Management: Manage cloud operating budgets, vendor relationships, and capacity planning across Azure services, GPU infrastructure, and AI tooling.

What You'll Bring

• Leadership Experience: 12+ years in infrastructure, platform, or cloud engineering at complex enterprise scale, with at least 5 years in senior leadership roles managing managers and multi-team organizations.
• AI Platform Expertise: 5+ years designing, operating, and scaling production AI and ML platforms, including MLOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code, and containerized platforms (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Azure at Scale: Deep enterprise-scale expertise with Microsoft Azure, including AI and ML services, networking, identity, security, governance, and cost management.
• Hybrid Infrastructure: Experience integrating and operating on-premise GPU and high-performance computing environments with cloud platforms.
• Operational Accountability: Proven ownership of platform reliability, incident command, and service-level objectives in regulated, compliance-sensitive environments.
• Governance & Risk Awareness: Working knowledge of Responsible AI, AI risk management, and regulatory and compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST AI RMF, etc.).
• Financial & Vendor Acumen: Cloud spend management through FinOps practices and enterprise vendor and contract management experience.
• Executive Presence: Strong communicator with the ability to advise senior leaders and influence cross-functional stakeholders. Comfortable as the single point of accountability for high-visibility platforms.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field required. Master's or MBA strongly preferred.
• Certifications: Advanced Microsoft Azure certifications (Azure Solutions Architect Expert, DevOps Engineer Expert) strongly preferred.

Strong Plus

• Experience in legal, professional services, financial services, or similarly regulated environments
• Familiarity with legal or professional services technology ecosystems
• Experience with Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, and AKS at enterprise scale
• Track record of building AI platforms that have moved from POC to production at scale

Compensation

• Competitive base salary in the $300,000 – $335,000
• Comprehensive benefits including healthcare, vision, dental, retirement, and learning and development.

Location & Onsite

• Chicago, IL strongly preferred (most firm technology operations are based in Chicago)
• NYC will be considered for the right candidate
• Hybrid onsite expected