AI Customer Engineering Lead

Leading at Cognizant

This is a Leadership role  believe how you lead is as important as what you deliver. Cognizant leaders at every level:
Drive our business strategy and inspire teams around our future. Live the leadership behaviors, leading themselves, others and the business. Uphold our Values, role modeling themin every action and decision. Nurture our people and culture, creating a workplace where all can thrive.

At Cognizant, leadership transcends titles and is embodied in actions and behaviors. We empower our leaders at every level to drive business strategy, inspire teams, uphold our values, and foster an inclusive culture.

As an AI Customer Engineering Lead, you will set the technology direction for delivering AI-Enabled solutions for enterprise customers. You will be a valued member of the team, working collaboratively with cross‑functional stakeholders, and clients to architect and position scalable AI/ML solutions. As a senior technologist with a strong architecture background and a proven record of success in customer‑facing or customer engineering roles, you will act as a trusted advisor and thought leader shaping solution strategy, influencing technical decisions, and representing Cognizant’s AI expertise in the market.

• Partner effectively with offering specialists and industry domain strategists to build the technology stack to deliver business solutions
• Participate in early‑stage ideation sessions with clients and account teams to explore the art of the possible with GenAI/AI
• Translate ambiguous client questions into solution hypotheses, conceptual flows, and initial narratives

• Define end‑to‑end solution options, including architecture outlines, data/ML needs, integration patterns, and partner components
• Create multiple solution pathways (good–better–best), documenting trade‑offs and feasibility

• Produce client‑ready solution artifacts: proposals, SoWs, architecture decks, value frameworks, and demo narratives
• Lead client walkthroughs, deep‑dive sessions, and technical Q&A to progress the opportunity

• Conduct deal governance checkpoints with delivery to ensure implementation and risk alignment
• Ensure smooth transition to delivery teams with full context, assumptions, and validated architecture

• Lead a team of Sr. Customer Engineers and Customer Engineers
• Set Goals, Mentor, and Build Development plans to create a strong customer engineering capability

Consistently demonstrate the Cognizant Way to Lead, which means operating with Personal Leadership (building trust, collaboration, and inclusion), Organizational Leadership (driving vision and purpose, demonstrating a strategic and enterprise mindset, and creating and communicating a bold direction that inspires purpose), and Business Leadership (exemplifying client focus, managing ambiguity with accountability and results, and operating with financial acumen)

• Demonstrated ability to build a team of solution engineers with varying levels of experience across the whole agentic stack.
• Overall experience of 20 years, with 10+ years in AI/ML engineering, solution architecture, pre‑sales, or technical consulting.
• Strong expertise in GenAI, LLMs, agent architectures, MLOps, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Strong communication, storytelling, and technical synthesis abilities
• Embodiment of the Cognizant Way to Lead:
  Leading Self, Leading Others, & Leading the Business
• The embodiment of Cognizant’s Values of:
  Work as One, Dare to Innovate, Raise the Bar, Do The right Thing, & Own It

• Leadership – Inspiring people, talent identification, and driving high performance.
• Solutioning Excellence – ability to design scalable, feasible, value‑led solutions.
• AI/ML Technical Depth – understanding of GenAI, LLMs, ML engineering, data pipelines, and agent architectures.
• Commercial Acumen – knowledgeable in pricing, estimation, and commercial trade‑offs.
• Risk & Governance Discipline – strong rigor in…