Associate Director, Analytics – Construction, California

Associate Director, Analytics - Construction, California

Role Brief: We are seeking a highly versatile and client‑facing Associate Director, Analytics to drive AI and analytics transformation initiatives for strategic clients in the construction and built‑environment domain. This role blends the responsibilities of a product owner, analytics consultant, solution architect, and hands‑on technology leader. The ideal candidate is someone who began their career as a strong hands‑on engineer/coder and has evolved into a consulting‑led leadership role capable of owning business outcomes, shaping AI products, engaging senior stakeholders, and leading cross‑functional delivery teams.

This individual will work at the intersection of AI/ML and analytics strategy, construction domain workflows and operational intelligence, product ownership and stakeholder management, data engineering and application architecture and full‑stack AI solution delivery. The role requires both strategic thinking and technical depth, with the ability to translate ambiguous business problems into scalable AI‑enabled products and platforms.

• Act as the primary AI/Analytics Product Owner for client engagements within the construction domain.
• Partner with client business stakeholders to identify high‑value AI, analytics, automation, and optimization opportunities.
• Define product vision, roadmap, KPIs, feature prioritization, and release planning for AI‑enabled platforms and solutions.
• Drive discovery workshops, problem framing sessions, and use‑case prioritization exercises.
• Translate business problems into scalable data, analytics, and AI solution architectures.
• Own stakeholder communication, executive reporting, and strategic advisory discussions.
• Lead development of AI/ML‑driven solutions involving Computer Vision, OCR/document intelligence, LLM and GenAI applications, Predictive analytics, Operational optimization, Recommendation systems.
• Define AI solution strategy, experimentation approach, evaluation metrics, and product ionization plans.
• Guide teams on model selection, data strategy, feature engineering, and deployment approaches.
• Establish scalable AI governance, monitoring, and feedback‑loop mechanisms.
• Provide technical leadership across:
  Data Engineering, Backend/API development, Full‑stack application architecture, Cloud‑native analytics platforms, BI and visualization ecosystems.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to design scalable architectures and integration patterns.
• Review technical designs, APIs, pipelines, and engineering implementation approaches.
• Ensure alignment between product vision and technical execution.
• Act as a trusted advisor to client leadership teams.
• Lead requirement discussions, solution walkthroughs, demos, and steering committee updates.
• Drive cross‑functional collaboration across business, data science, engineering, and UX teams.
• Manage delivery governance, prioritization, risks, dependencies, and execution tracking.
• Mentor teams and foster a strong engineering and innovation culture.

• 10–15+ years of experience across analytics, AI/ML, data engineering, and enterprise application delivery.
• Prior experience in consulting, analytics advisory, or client‑facing transformation programs.
• Strong experience acting as AI Product Owner, Analytics Lead, Solution Architect, Technical Program Lead.
• Early career experience as a hands‑on software engineer/developer is mandatory.
• Experience working with construction, engineering, manufacturing, industrial, or built‑environment clients is strongly preferred.
• Knowledge of Analytics & AI.
• Strong understanding of Machine Learning, Deep Learning, GenAI/LLM ecosystems, NLP and Computer Vision, Predictive analytics, Statistical modelling.
• Experience with AI product lifecycle management and production AI systems.
• Strong knowledge of Data pipelines and ETL/ELT, Data warehousing/Lakehouse architectures, Streaming and batch processing, SQL and distributed data processing.
• Experience with modern cloud data ecosystems.
• Strong backend engineering foundation with experience in Python / Node.js / Java, REST APIs and microservices, Event‑driven systems.
• Understanding of…