Director, AI Engineering

About the role

Serve as PCI's senior technical leader for AI engineering, providing architectural direction, technical oversight, and implementation guidance for enterprise AI initiatives. Partner with business and technology stakeholders to evaluate AI opportunities, define technical approaches, and shape the future of AI at PCI.

Responsibilities

• Provide architectural direction, technical oversight, and implementation guidance for enterprise AI initiatives.
• Partner with business and technology stakeholders to evaluate AI opportunities and determine appropriate technical approaches, architectures, and implementation strategies.
• Define and maintain AI engineering standards, reference architectures, design patterns, and best practices that support scalable, secure, and supportable solutions.
• Lead the architecture, design, implementation, and operationalization of AI solutions across customer-facing and internal business use cases.
• Establish solution patterns for generative AI, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), agentic workflows, intelligent assistants, and AI-enabled automation.
• Design and oversee AI integrations across enterprise platforms, business applications, digital products, and the Enterprise Data Platform.
• Drive technical decision-making throughout the AI solution lifecycle from ideation through production deployment and ongoing optimization.
• Establish and maintain AI engineering, operational, MLOps, and LLMOps practices across development, testing, validation, and production environments.
• Implement processes for model lifecycle management, monitoring, observability, testing, version control, and continuous improvement.
• Ensure AI solutions are engineered for scalability, reliability, maintainability, supportability, and operational readiness.
• Partner with Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Quality, and Data Engineering teams to implement technical controls supporting PCI's AI governance framework.
• Partner with Legal, Procurement, Cybersecurity, Quality, and business stakeholders to assess the technical feasibility, operational impact, and implementation requirements of AI-related contractual commitments, security controls, data protection requirements, and regulatory obligations.
• Support AI risk assessments, validation activities, audit readiness efforts, and governance reviews as required.
• Ensure AI solutions align with regulatory requirements, security standards, privacy requirements, responsible AI principles, and applicable quality processes.
• Monitor, forecast, and optimize AI-related platform, licensing, model consumption, infrastructure, and operational costs.
• Establish metrics and reporting related to AI adoption, operational effectiveness, solution performance, cost optimization, and business value realization.
• Serve as the primary technical lead for AI-related vendors, consultants, contractors, and implementation partners.
• Direct and oversee AI solution delivery performed by external development teams and strategic technology partners.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies, products, platforms, models, service providers, and industry practices to support technical decision-making and innovation.
• Ensure partner-delivered solutions align with PCI architecture standards, quality expectations, delivery commitments, and business objectives.
• Build and mature PCI's AI engineering capability, including future team development, mentoring, knowledge sharing, and engineering excellence.
• Foster a culture of innovation, responsible experimentation, continuous improvement, and technical learning across the AI engineering function.
• Complete all job duties in compliance with company policies, SOPs, safety rules, and all applicable federal, state, local, quality, and regulatory requirements, including OSHA, FDA, and cGMP standards.
• Adhere to all PCI, cGMP, and GCP policies, procedures, and rules.
• Perform other duties as assigned by Manager/Supervisor.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, platform engineering, AI engineering, data engineering, or related technology disciplines, including experience leading complex enterprise technology initiatives.
• 5+ years of leadership experience managing technical teams, projects, vendor-delivered solutions, or engineering functions.
• Demonstrated experience serving as a senior technical authority for AI initiatives, including evaluation of AI use cases, selection of technical approaches, architectural decision-making, technical governance, vendor oversight, and operationalization of AI solutions.
• Experience with Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic AI systems, enterprise AI platforms, and modern AI solution architectures.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architectures, APIs, integration patterns, and the design of scalable, secure, and supportable enterprise solutions.
• Experience establishing and supporting operational practices for AI solutions, including lifecycle management, monitoring, governance, observability, and continuous improvement.
• Strong understanding of cybersecurity, privacy, compliance, responsible AI principles, and implementation of technical controls within regulated or governance-driven environments.
• Experience working with external vendors, consulting partners, contractors, managed service providers, and offshore delivery teams to deliver technology solutions and business outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to evaluate emerging technologies, communicate effectively with technical and business stakeholders, and translate strategic opportunities into scalable technical solutions.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field (preferred).
• Experience with Microsoft Azure AI Services, Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot, AWS AI Services, Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or similar enterprise AI platforms (preferred).
• Experience establishing MLOps, LLMOps, AI observability, model monitoring, and AI governance capabilities within enterprise environments (preferred).
• Experience designing and deploying AI-enabled digital products, enterprise knowledge management solutions, intelligent automation, agentic workflows, and AI-driven business process transformation initiatives (preferred).
• Pharmaceutical, life sciences, healthcare, manufacturing, or other highly regulated industry experience, including support for validation, audit readiness, quality systems, or regulatory compliance requirements (preferred).

Special Demands

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job.

• Stationary Position: From 1/4 to 1/2 of the day.
• Move, Traverse: From 1/4 to 1/2 of the day.
• Communicate or exchange information: 3/4 of the day and up.
• On an average day, the individual can expect to move and/or transport up to 10 pounds less than 1/4 of the day.
• Ability to focus is required.

Work Environment

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job.

• Work is primarily performed at a desk and/or in an office environment for 1/4 to 1/2 of the day.
• The noise level in the work environment is typically quiet.