VP, Head of Responsible AI

Role: VP, Head of Responsible AI

Location: New York, NY (Flexible - Hybrid)

Summary of the role:

As the Head of Responsible AI, you will lead the Responsible & Secure AI program for the enterprise. Reporting to the General Counsel (GC) and the Chief Information Officer (CIO), you will mature and institutionalize the function that ensures all AI initiatives are ethically sound, legally compliant, and architecturally resilient.

In a data-centric operations environment, this role serves as the bridge between technical innovation and legal safeguard—enforcing a dual mandate: accelerating AI adoption while minimizing systemic risk.

As part of your duties, you will be responsible for:

1. Strategic Leadership & Governance

• Operationalize the Charter: Define the 3-year maturity roadmap for Responsible & Secure AI, aligning it with client commitments and global regulations.
• Together with the GC and CIO, lead the AI Governance Committee to ensure a single, unified voice on AI approval and deployment.
• AI System of Record: Establish and maintain the "Source of Truth" for all AI assets—consolidating model registries, lineage, and audit trails.

2. AI Security & Defense (The "Secure" Mandate)

• Partner with the Information Security team on:
• Adversarial Resilience: Oversee AI red-teaming and stress testing to protect against prompt injection, model extraction, and data poisoning.
• Secure AI Lifecycle: embed security into the LLMOps/DevSecOps pipeline, ensuring "Secure by Design" principles for agentic and autonomous systems.
• Data Sovereignty: Ensure RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and fine-tuning workflows do not result in PII leakage or cross-contamination of client data.
• Shadow AI Mitigation: Implement discovery and governance protocols to identify and secure unauthorized AI usage across business units.

3. Regulatory & Ethical Compliance

• Global Regulatory Radar: Ensure compliance with the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, and evolving state-level US laws (e.g., Colorado AI Act).
• Algorithmic Fairness: Mandate bias detection and mitigation protocols to ensure AI-driven business process decisions are equitable and transparent.
• Human-in-the-Loop (HITL): Define and enforce the "Human-in-the-loop" requirements for high-stakes operational tasks to prevent autonomous "drift" or "hallucination" damage.

4. Client & Operations Enablement

• Business Integration: Partner with Business Units to "RAI-enable" client workflows, ensuring that rapid automation does not bypass established risk guardrails.
• Third-Party Oversight: Lead the vetting process for foundation model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and open-source AI libraries to ensure they meet our security and ethical benchmarks.

5. Enterprise AI Policy Implementation & Audits

• Oversee adherence to Responsible AI policies through periodic audits, monitoring dashboards, and compliance reviews
• Ensure readiness for internal and external assessments, including client driven AI governance evaluations‑driven AI governance evaluations

6. Capability Building and Culture Development

• Lead enterprise-wide evangelization, awareness and training sessions to build a culture of responsible AI use and risk-sensitive innovation
• Build and mentor a team comprising AI governance leads, risk specialists, AI ethicists, and security experts

Qualifications and experience we consider to be essential for the role:

• Experience: 12+ years of total professional experience in technical, legal, or risk leadership, with at least 5+ years of dedicated experience in AI/ML governance, security, or ethics.
• The "Hybrid" Expert: You must be able to discuss Transformer architectures and vector databases with engineers, and liability/indemnification with the Legal team.
• Regulatory Fluency: Deep familiarity with NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, and the EU AI Act.
• Operational Depth: Proven experience in building a "Governance-as-a-Service" model in a global, highly regulated, or client-servicing enterprise
• Education: Bachelors in CS, Data Science, or Law/Ethics with a technical focus.
• A law degree is a plus but not required
• Industry certifications in AI ethics, security, governance, risk, or compliance desirable

Skills and Personal attributes we would like to have:

Behavioral Skills

• Diplomacy: Combines accountability and urgency with the political acumen required to navigate the dual CIO/GC reporting line. Expert at balancing the business need for "Speed to Market" with the ethical mandate of "Safe to Market" through data-grounded decision-making and cross-boundary collaboration

Functional Skills

• Regulatory Mastery & Trust Sales: Expert knowledge of global frameworks (NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, EU AI Act) paired with the ability to lead technical "Trust Audits."

Technical Skills

• Proficient in LLMOps and privacy-by-design, with specific hands-on expertise in defending against prompt injection, model inversion, and data poisoning, as well as applying confidential computing principles
• Agentic & Autonomous Governance: Mastery of GenAI/LLM risk frameworks and guardrail tools (e.g., NeMo, LlamaGuard). Specifically skilled in the governance of "Agentic AI"—systems that take autonomous actions (e.g., API calls, transaction execution) on behalf of the company or client

Process Specific Skills

• AI Supply Chain Integrity: Seamlessly integrates AI/ML validation into MLOps and DevSecOps workflows. Leads the creation and management of the "AI Bill of Materials" (AI/BOM), ensuring full transparency and audit-readiness for every dataset, weight, and third-party library in the production pipeline

Key Performance Indicators:

• Framework Adoption: % of internal and client-facing models fully compliant with the NIST-aligned "Safe AI" framework.
• Risk Mitigation: Zero "High" or "Critical" ethics/security incidents resulting from unvetted AI deployments.
• Audit Readiness: Successful completion of third-party AI audits and certifications (e.g., ISO/IEC 42001).
• Client Confidence: Qualitative "Trust Score" improvements in client surveys and successful closure of AI-dependent contracts.