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.

What You Will Do

• 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.

Success Measures

• Division‑wide AI adoption.

• Delivery of scalable, enterprise‑grade platforms.

• Number of production AI agents driving measurable efficiency and effectiveness gains.

What You Need to Be Successful

• 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.

Bonus Points if You Have

• 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.

What Makes You Eligible

• 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.

What We Offer

• 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.
• "Be Brilliant" employee recognition and rewards program.

• An inclusive and diverse work environment that fosters and encourages professional and personal development.

Pay

$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…