Director of AI and Automation

By the Sea Resorts

Panama City Beach, FL

Full-Time

By the Sea Resorts is seeking a highly capable, hands‑on Director of AI & Automation to lead the practical adoption of artificial intelligence, automation, and emerging technologies across our growing organization. This position combines AI strategy with hands‑on technical execution. We are looking for someone who can determine where AI can create meaningful business value and then personally design, develop, integrate, test, and deploy the solutions needed to make it happen.

This is not a purely advisory, consulting, or AI architecture role. The successful candidate will be expected to write code, build integrations, work with APIs and databases, develop AI applications and automated workflows, troubleshoot technical problems, and take solutions from concept through production deployment. By the Sea Resorts operates a diverse portfolio of hotels, restaurants, employee housing, and commercial laundry facilities.

The Director of AI & Automation will work directly with company leadership and operational teams across Operations, Human Resources, Finance, Sales, Marketing, Revenue Management, IT, and Commercial Laundry. The ideal candidate combines the vision to identify how AI can transform a business with the technical ability to personally build the systems that make that transformation possible.

• Develop and lead the company's long‑term AI, automation, and digital transformation strategy.
• Identify high‑value opportunities for AI, workflow automation, system integration, and process improvement throughout the organization.
• Personally design, code, build, test, deploy, and maintain AI‑powered applications, internal tools, assistants, agents, and automated workflows.
• Build production‑ready solutions using large language models and AI platforms such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, or similar technologies.
• Develop AI agents, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) systems, internal knowledge assistants, enterprise search tools, and decision‑support applications.
• Integrate AI and automation solutions with existing company systems using APIs, databases, webhooks, middleware, and integration platforms.
• Work with property management systems, reservation systems, point‑of‑sale systems, accounting platforms, HR systems, operational systems, and other enterprise technology.
• Build and maintain data pipelines and integrations necessary to support AI applications and automated business processes.
• Develop internal applications and tools using Python, SQL, APIs, and other appropriate technologies.
• Partner directly with executives, department leaders, hotel teams, front‑line employees, call centers, plant managers, and other operators to understand business challenges.
• Translate operational problems into practical technical solutions.
• Create prototypes when appropriate, but take successful solutions beyond experimentation into reliable production systems employees actually use.
• Evaluate third‑party AI and automation products and determine when the organization should build internally versus purchase or integrate an outside platform.
• Create AI‑powered reporting, analytics, forecasting, dashboards, and decision‑support tools.
• Automate repetitive administrative and operational processes while maintaining appropriate controls and human oversight.
• Establish standards for AI security, data privacy, access control, responsible AI use, and governance in partnership with IT and executive leadership.
• Test AI systems for accuracy, security, reliability, scalability, and usability before deployment.
• Monitor deployed solutions and continuously improve performance based on user feedback, system performance, and…