Vice President - Artificial Intelligence

Role Responsibilities

• Define Overall AI Strategy: Take ownership of a "blank white board" to architect, launch, and execute Coastal's comprehensive AI consulting strategy, practice structure, and AI services portfolio, including identifying new offerings, retiring outdated capabilities, prioritizing investments, and ensuring alignment with market demand and partner roadmaps.
• Market Leadership: Drive Coastal's strategic positioning and technical excellence as a leading consultancy for Anthropic, OpenAI, and Salesforce AI solutions, working closely with marketing, sales and delivery.
• Thought Leadership & GTM Support: Serve as Coastal’s primary internal and external subject matter expert on AI; partner closely with marketing and GTM teams to develop collateral, publish insights, and build brand authority.
• Client-Facing Pitching & Advisory: Act as a strategic executive in client-facing environments, pitching AI services to prospective clients and advising enterprise leaders on AI roadmaps.
• Establish Implementation Best Practices: Define frameworks and guardrails for deploying AI solutions responsibly and effectively, guiding delivery teams on implementation best practices.
• Practice Building & Team Management: Recruit, onboard, and manage a high-performing team of 2 to 5 direct reports in AI Engineer roles to support growing project pipelines.
• Company Enablement: Develop and lead ongoing Data & AI enablement for sales, marketing, and delivery teams, ensuring employees understand Coastal's AI point of view, and evolving capabilities.
• Internal AI Tooling Oversight: Stay at the forefront of the rapidly evolving AI landscape to vet and recommend cutting-edge tools for both internal operations and the creation of new services. Collaborate closely with the Delivery Excellence team to ensure Coastal leverages these technologies (such as Sweep.io) to maximize consultant productivity and drive continuous innovation.
• Partner Strategy: Work closely with our internal alliances and marketing strategists to develop relationships with our partners including Salesforce, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Experience/Skills Required

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field (Master’s preferred).
• Experience: 15+ years of experience in a technical role, such as a solutions engineer, innovation engineer, or related field.
• Consulting Leadership: Proven background in management consulting or technology consulting, with a track record of advising enterprise-level stakeholders.
• AI Subject Matter Expertise: Deep knowledge of modern AI frameworks, large language models (LLMs), and best practices for implementing scalable AI solutions.
• Platform Familiarity: Strong strategic and technical understanding of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Salesforce AI ecosystems.
• Broad Ecosystem Awareness: General technical awareness of data and AI capabilities within platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, and similar cloud data architectures.
• Entrepreneurial Mindset: Demonstrated capability to build a practice, service line, or corporate strategy from scratch with minimal initial structure.
• People Management: Experience hiring, mentoring, and directly managing technical teams (specifically software or AI engineers).
• Communication Excellence: Superb client-facing presentation, pitching, and communication skills, with the ability to translate complex AI capabilities into clear business value.
• Travel Mobility: Ability and willingness to travel up to 50% for client pitches, site visits, and industry events.