Director, AI - Process Excellence

About the Role

We are seeking a hands‑on technical leader who can drive enterprise‑scale AI adoption across our automotive division.

• Lead the architecture and development of AI platforms focused on internal process excellence.
• Partner with the Automotive Principal Architect to define the architecture, tools, and processes for AI/ML adoption globally.
• Manage a team of five AI practitioners, while mentoring global teams implementing AI solutions.
• Design and implement advanced AI solutions requiring cross‑value‑stream orchestration.
• Influence an AI‑first culture across HARMAN’s Automotive Digital roadmap as part of the Automotive Digital Leadership coalition.
• Lead development of end‑to‑end data platforms for agentic AI training, evaluation, and reinforcement, aligned with strategy, budget, and resources.
• Build scalable, real‑time pipelines to ingest, transform, and store multimodal data (text, logs, user interactions, actions, environments).
• Design dynamic memory and knowledge systems (vector stores, graph DBs, memory stores).
• Collaborate with researchers to integrate live feedback, human‑in‑the‑loop data, and auto‑labeling systems.
• Own data governance, quality, and security policies for self‑improving AI agents, aligning with global standards.
• Build observability tools for agent behavior and decision tracking (lineage, reproducibility, versioning).
• Mentor junior engineers and cultivate a high‑performance engineering culture.
• Stay ahead of AI infrastructure trends and incorporate best practices into roadmaps.
• Act as subject matter expert for AI engineering internally and externally.
• Manage budgets for AI tools and rigorously measure value generated vs. costs.
• Drive ecosystem partnerships, vendor management, and executive‑level influence to advance adoption.

• Division‑wide AI adoption.
• Delivery of scalable, enterprise‑grade platforms.
• Number of production AI agents driving measurable efficiency and effectiveness gains.

• Graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (PhD a plus).
• 10+ years of data engineering experience, including 5+ years in leadership or architecture.
• Expertise in Python and SQL.
• Strong background in real‑time streaming frameworks (Kafka, Pulsar, Spark Streaming, Flink).
• Experience building and maintaining data lakes/warehouses (Snowflake, Delta Lake, Big Query, MS Fabric).
• Hands‑on with LLMs, vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS), and agent memory systems.
• Knowledge of MLOps/agent lifecycle tooling (Lang Chain, MCP, Auto Gen, MLflow).
• Cloud‑native architecture experience (AWS/GCP/Azure), incl. orchestration (Airflow, dbt).
• Proven ability to influence, lead change, and communicate effectively with stakeholders.

• Familiarity withagent frameworks(OpenAI Assistants, Lang Graph, AutoGPT, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel).
• Data engineering certification (e.g., DP‑600 for MS Fabric).
• Project Management certification (e.g., PMI).
• Advanced cross‑cultural leadership and conflict resolution skills.
• Automotive or manufacturing industry knowledge.

• Willingness to travel up to 20%, including international travel (team collaboration, customers, partners, and conferences).
• Flexibility to work remotely or from a US HARMAN office hub.
• Successfully complete a background investigation and drug screen as a condition of employment.

• Access to employee discounts on world‑class products (JBL, HARMAN Kardon, AKG, and more).
• Extensive training opportunities through our own HARMAN University.
• Competitive wellness benefits.
• Tuition reimbursement.
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  Be Brilliant" employee recognition and rewards program.
• An inclusive and diverse work environment that fosters and encourages professional and personal development.

$207,000 - $303,600

Dependent on the position offered, other forms of compensation are also available, such as bonuses or commission. Pay is based on a wide range of factors, including, without limitation, skill set, experience, training, location, and business need. While the above range is a reasonable estimate of the wage range for this position, please note the disclosed range estimate has not been adjusted…