Associate Director, AI Engineering

About the role

Youll be one of the senior technical leaders responsible for the direction quality and growth of AI Engineering at Blend
360.

This is a broad leadership role spanning technical strategy major client engagements engineering standards and the development of our AI Engineering capability. Youll operate across the department providing leadership wherever the biggest technical decisions risks or opportunities sit.

Youll also remain deeply hands-on. Youll design architectures challenge technical decisions work directly with engineers and clients and get into the code when the problem warrants it.

Youll be expected to challenge technical decisions where needed explain your reasoning clearly and help teams arrive at stronger solutions. When a client or internal team proposes an approach that wont hold up youll be able to identify the risks make the case for a better option and take responsibility for the technical direction.

Were not looking for someone to simply review or approve other peoples architecture. Youll be expected to set technical direction make difficult decisions and remain accountable for the quality of what we deliver.

Our AI Engineering work spans CPG pharma and energy clients and its growing.

The work

• Set technical direction across AI Engineering defining the architecture principles engineering standards delivery practices and technical capabilities we need as the practice grows.

• Own the technical quality of major AI engagements particularly where architecture scale complexity or delivery risk requires senior leadership.

• Lead across multiple projects and technical work streams setting priorities and direction while ensuring teams can execute without becoming dependent on you for every decision.

• Design and review production AI architectures including retrieval and knowledge layers agentic pipelines evaluation multilingual systems and the cost latency reliability and scalability trade-offs involved.

• Remain hands-on on the hardest problems: reviewing code prototyping approaches resolving architectural issues and working directly with engineers when senior technical intervention will materially improve the outcome.

• Run rigorous design reviews that raise the engineering bar across the practice and create an environment where technical decisions are challenged regardless of seniority.

• Act as a senior technical counterpart to clients including CxO and architecture leadership taking ownership of difficult technical conversations trade-offs delivery risks and changes in direction.

• Own the technical quality of major AI proposals translating solution concepts into credible architectures scopes delivery models team structures estimates and commercial assumptions.

• Work with commercial and account leadership to shape technical propositions identify opportunities and determine where the AI Engineering practice should invest and differentiate.

• Develop senior engineers and technical leads building the leadership depth and succession required to scale the department.

• Shape the AI Engineering capability plan including hiring priorities skills development team composition and the bar for senior technical talent.

Qualifications :

• At least 10 years experience across AI data and software engineering including 3 years leading engineering teams or a substantial technical function within consulting or professional services.

• Experience operating beyond individual project leadership with responsibility for technical direction engineering quality or capability across multiple teams.

• Deep technical credibility. Youre comfortable working in production Python substantial codebases and API-driven systems that need to perform reliably at scale.

• Recent personal experience architecting and building production AI systems. Expect to discuss retrieval strategy caching context economics serving constraints evaluation observability and what went wrong in practice.

• Strong systems thinking. You can reason through unfamiliar platforms and problems rather than relying on expertise in a single stack.

• Experience leading complex programmes or multiple concurrent engineering work streams with accountability for technical direction planning resourcing risk and delivery outcomes.

• The judgement to know when to intervene personally and when to lead through others delegating effectively without giving up accountability for technical quality.

• Experience developing senior engineers and technical leaders shaping team capability and raising the engineering bar across a wider organisation.

• Commercial awareness sufficient to turn a technical solution into a realistic scope team shape estimate and delivery plan and to challenge assumptions that do not hold up.

• Experience contributing to account growth technical propositions or go-to-market activity within a consulting organisation.

• Confidence operating with senior clients and executives while remaining credible with engineers at code and architecture level.

• The ability to make difficult technical calls create clarity where…