Director of AI

ABOUT APPLY

APPLY is the Agentic Customer Experience (ACx) partner for the world’s most ambitious consumer and entertainment brands. We bring together deep domain expertise across Retail, CPG, Sports, and Media with AI-native delivery capability, designing and delivering agentic solutions that turn CX vision into commercial reality. We are the partner of choice for brands like Arc'teryx, NFL, Lululemon, and Kraft Heinz. For more information, visit

APPLY is hybrid/remote friendly. The preferred candidate should be based in Canada, working in hours that align to ET (Eastern Timezone) or PT (Pacific Timezone).

Are you an experienced AI engineering leader who can turn complex business problems into reliable, production-ready AI solutions? Do you enjoy working directly with clients while staying close enough to the technology to shape architectures, guide engineers, and resolve critical delivery challenges?

APPLY is seeking a Director of AI to lead the design and delivery of AI-enabled products and platforms across client engagements. This senior, client-facing role combines AI and software engineering expertise with consulting judgment, product thinking, and technical leadership.

You will help clients move from AI ambition to working solutions—from identifying valuable opportunities and rapidly validating ideas to engineering, deploying, and operating secure, scalable AI applications. You will serve as a senior technical authority while contributing hands‑on expertise through architecture, prototyping, technical reviews, and delivery oversight.

You will also help advance APPLY’s AI engineering capability by developing reusable patterns, standards, accelerators, and delivery practices.

• Lead the technical strategy, architecture, and delivery of AI applications from discovery and experimentation through production and scale.

• Work with client executives, product leaders, architects, and engineering teams to identify valuable AI opportunities and translate them into achievable technical roadmaps.

• Design AI applications that combine models, enterprise data, APIs, software components, user experiences, and human workflows.

• Guide the implementation of agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, enterprise search, predictive models, and AI capabilities embedded in digital products.

• Determine when to use deterministic software, machine learning, large language models, human review, or a combination of approaches.

• Establish evaluation-driven development practices, including test datasets, error analysis, deterministic checks, model-based evaluation, and business outcome measurement.

• Ensure solutions meet production requirements for reliability, observability, scalability, latency, maintainability, security, and cost.

• Guide practices for CI/CD, model and prompt versioning, monitoring, tracing, regression testing, and ongoing optimization.

• Provide hands‑on technical leadership through prototyping, architecture reviews, code reviews, troubleshooting, and delivery oversight.

• Use AI-assisted development and coding agents effectively while maintaining appropriate verification, security, and human oversight.

• Support proposals, discovery workshops, solution design, estimates, and executive presentations.

• Develop reusable AI engineering patterns, reference architectures, accelerators, and delivery standards.

• Contribute to hiring, technical mentorship, and the continued growth of APPLY’s AI capability.

• 10+ years of experience across software engineering, data engineering, machine learning, or related technology disciplines, including significant experience leading AI or ML solutions.

• Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating AI or machine learning…