Associate Director, Applied AI Platform Engineering (PxE Platforms)

About the role

As an Associate Director, Applied AI Platform Engineering, you will set the engineering vision and technical direction for the Applied AI engineering platform—the frameworks, tooling, control plane, and data platform that every other engineering team builds on—treating the platform as a product and solving recurring problems once, well, for many teams. Leading across teams and product groups, you will stay hands-on in your craft—shaping architecture, design, and code—while driving the golden paths, reusable components, and governed, self-service capabilities that engineering teams depend on. Your leadership will be pivotal in delivering tangible leverage and value across Deloitte's AI engineering investments, maximizing reuse and reducing per-team toil, and advancing Applied AI platform engineering across the organization. You will bring extensive engineering craftsmanship and deep expertise across platform engineering, distributed systems, and modern AI/ML and data infrastructure, together with an exemplary track record of high-quality, reusable, outcome-focused delivery at scale. The ideal candidate is a role-model engineering leader who leads by doing—setting vision, elevating standards, developing engineers and emerging leaders, and building trusted relationships with stakeholders from engineering teams to executives.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Vision and Alignment: Craft and articulate a vision for the Applied AI engineering platform—the frameworks, tooling, accelerators, control plane, and data platform that every other engineering team builds on—in alignment with the Business Strategy and US Deloitte Technology strategy. Treat the platform as a product, mapping the needs of consuming engineering teams to reusable, self-service capabilities. Collaborate with diverse stakeholders across product, engineering, SRE, security and risk, data governance, and infrastructure at all organizational levels.
• Advocacy and Technology Roadmap: Advocate for, develop, and communicate the integrated platform engineering strategy and its implementation roadmap, positioning the platform as a product to the engineering teams who consume it and to business stakeholders. Ensure the organization is well-informed about objectives, KPIs, adoption, maturity, compliance, and progress. Promote a culture of reuse, quality, and speed—solving recurring problems once, well, for many teams to reduce per-team build and operate toil, maximize engineering leverage, and minimize total cost of ownership.
• Craft Mastery and Objectives Realization: Define, measure, and drive the achievement of platform KPIs and NFRs—adoption, reliability-by-design, developer experience, performance, scalability, and security. Establish and evolve platform reference architectures, golden paths, and reusable components—including the AI control plane (with the model/LLM gateway) and agent-runtime patterns, MLOps/LLMOps tooling, model serving, retrieval and vector infrastructure and RAG-as-a-Service, Eval-as-a-Service and observability tooling, prompt management, and feature store; governance-as-code enforcement, control codification, and ontology management; the data platform (data catalog and marketplace, DataOps, data management and enterprise integration, master data, pipelines, and metadata/lineage); and CI/CD at platform scale—delivered through the AI and Agentic SSDLC as self-service, governed capabilities with full automation from discovery to production to operations and quality checks through the SSDLC lifecycle. Remain hands-on with design, architecture, and code—contributing to the leverage and velocity of the engineering teams and product groups that build on the platform—while reviewing code, driving tech-debt reduction, and experimenting with new technology.
• Capability Evolution and Development: As a recognized engineering leader, mentor and develop engineers and emerging engineering leaders, coaching modern platform engineering practices—internal developer platforms, distributed systems, the AI control plane and agentic patterns, MLOps/LLMOps, cloud-native design and container orchestration, platform-scale infrastructure-as-code, and the data platform. Lead by example through thought leadership—showcasing experiments internally, speaking at conferences, publishing whitepapers or blogs, and leading R&D collaborations, including with academia. Cultivate a growth mindset and modern engineering behaviors across the organization.
• Iterative Value Delivery: Embrace an iterative and incremental approach to platform engineering, delivering platform capabilities as lean, adoption-validated increments rather than big-bang builds. Apply a leaning-forward approach and empirical methods to navigate complexity and uncertainty, keeping capabilities supportable and maintainable and ensuring each increment delivers value and stays aligned with consuming-team and business goals.
• Customer-Centric Problem Solving: Maintain a relentless focus on the real needs of the engineering teams who consume the platform—your primary customers—developing lean capabilities through rapid, inexpensive experimentation and engaging those teams before, during, and after delivery so the right capability is delivered at the right time and adopted, not shelved. Minimize unnecessary technical complexity and avoid overengineering, and drive toward peak performance through continuous learning and collaborative execution.
• Expert Proficiency and Continuous Improvement: Possess deep expertise in modern platform engineering and AI/ML and data infrastructure, with a keen ability to identify inefficiencies and opportunities for innovation across the platform and the engineering operating model. Continuously enhance the operating model to be lean, adaptable, and responsive—guiding and transforming the organization to embrace lean principles and foster a culture of innovation.
• Tech/Quality Risk Management: Establish and evolve the enterprise tech-stack conformance baseline, platform standards, and quality benchmarks that engineering teams build against—embedding consistency, compliance, and security by default through guardrails (PII redaction, prompt-injection and content controls, tool permissioning and RBAC) and multi-tenant isolation, so that the secure, compliant, and reliable path is the easy path. Build capabilities that are operable, instrumented, performant, and drift-resistant by design to the production standards set by SRE, delivering them admissible-by-design and co-defining service-level objectives with SRE, who own the admission decision. Proactively identify technical risks and develop mitigation strategies through proactive problem-solving and contingency planning.
• Influential Communication: Influence, persuade, and drive decision-making across the organization. Communicate effectively in both written and verbal forms, crafting clear, structured arguments and technical trade-offs supported by evidence.
• Organizational Engagement and Collaboration: Engage stakeholders at all levels—from team members to middle management to executives—and collaborate with empowered, cross-functional partners across engineering, SRE, security and risk, and data governance, integrating their constraints into the paved roads. Build collaborative, constructive relationships and co-create momentum and value across the organization.

About the team

US Deloitte Technology Product Engineering has modernized software and product delivery, creating a scalable, cost-effective model that focuses on value/outcomes that leverages a progressive and responsive talent structure. As Deloitte's primary internal development team, Product Engineering delivers innovative digital solutions to businesses, service lines, and internal operations with proven bottom-line results and outcomes. It helps power Deloitte's success. It is the engine that drives Deloitte, serving many of the world's largest, most respected companies. We develop and deploy cutting-edge internal and go-to-market solutions that help Deloitte operate effectively and lead in the market. Our reputation is built on a tradition of delivering with excellence.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, data science, machine learning, or related discipline (experience is the most relevant factor).
• Candidates must be located within a commutable distance to one of the select locations available for this role.
• Ability to work in your local office at a minimum of 3 days per week.
• 10+ years of software and platform engineering experience with most of the following: Angular, React, NodeJS, Python (mandatory), C#, .NET, Java, Rust, SQL/NoSQL, REST/SOAP/GraphQL, SSO/MFA, PyTorch, TensorFlow, LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, LangFuse, Terraform, as well as unit, integration, and end-to-end testing frameworks & tools, specifically BDD