Senior Director, AI Engineering

ZS is a place where passion changes lives. As a management consulting and technology firm focused on improving life and how we live it, we transform ideas into impact by bringing together data, science, technology and human ingenuity to deliver better outcomes for all. Here you’ll work side‑by‑side with a powerful collective of thinkers and experts shaping life‑changing solutions for patients, caregivers and consumers, worldwide.

ZSers drive impact by bringing a client‑first mentality to each and every engagement. We partner collaboratively with our clients to develop custom solutions and technology products that create value and deliver company results across critical areas of their business. Bring your curiosity for learning, bold ideas, courage and passion to drive life‑changing impact to ZS.

ZAIDYN is ZS’s product business that is already making 9 figure ARR that is growing rapidly at 35%. Our products are used by 8 out of 10 large pharma and over 150 clients worldwide across 100 countries. We are in the middle of building our next generation Agentic AI platform that forms the underpinning of all our AI applications. These Agentic Applications will span Commercial Operations, Personalization/Marketing, Clinical operations, Medical Affairs and Patient Engagement.

This is ZAIDYN's key AI Engineering leadership position. You will expand and strengthen the team responsible for our agentic platform. This is a hands‑on, deeply technical role that requires someone who can hold an architecture conversation with Architects and engineers, then pivot to delivering a pitch of our architecture to a CIO.

You will report directly to the Head of Engineering/CTO, partner with the Sr. Director of Product Management and work alongside our application product and platform teams to define what it means for ZAIDYN to ship trusted, production‑grade AI. The word 'trusted' is critical here, and not just another marketing adjective. Our clients are enterprises making real decisions with real consequences and looking for us to enable Agentic operations.

Thus, the AI applications we build must be a) Accurate, comprehensive and relevant and b) auditable, governed, and compliant.

Build and lead the ZAIDYN AI Engineering function

• Lead the dedicated AI Engineering team by hiring, structuring, and setting the technical culture.
• Define the team model that scales with engineering pods organized around platform capabilities and rationalized across geographies.
• Own the full talent lifecycle from sourcing, hiring, onboarding, performance, and retention.
• Partner with Product and QA to establish AI‑native development practices including eval frameworks, LLM Ops discipline, and agent observability standards.

Own the Agentic Platform Architecture

• Drive architecture decisions for ZAIDYN's agentic platform from orchestration and retrieval to validation‑gate agent patterns, cost management and multi‑agent coordination.
• Own the technical integration between AWS Bedrock Agent Core and our orchestration and observability stack, and ZAIDYN Applications.
• Set standards for when to use RAG vs. fine‑tuning vs. long‑context approaches; enforce those standards through code review and design review.
• Ensure the platform meets enterprise‑grade requirements: latency, cost‑per‑inference, audit trails, hallucination management, and PII handling.
• Lead the push from agentic alpha to beta to GA holding the team accountable to shipping and adoption timelines, not research timelines.

Define and Enforce Engineering Quality

• Establish evaluation frameworks for every AI feature before it goes to clients.
• Distinguish clearly between demo‑quality and production‑quality AI and hold that line.
• Lead the organization on building high quality, accurate, reliable and consistent AI applications.
• Create PR review standards for LLM‑powered features that your team and future teams inherit.

Represent AI Engineering Externally

• Engage with technical leadership on clients on technical credibility; able to explain architectural decisions in language executives and enterprise architects both understand.
• Contribute to ZAIDYN's thought leadership on trusted…