Director of AI Engineering

We’re seeking a Director of AI Engineering to build and lead a new AI Engineering function from the ground up. This is a highly visible opportunity for a hands‑on technical leader who wants to shape AI strategy, architecture, infrastructure, and team development while delivering production AI solutions. What You’ll Do: Build and lead a high-performing AI/ML engineering team Define the AI engineering strategy, architecture, and technical roadmap Design and deploy agentic AI systems and AI agents leveraging operational and commercial data Lead the deployment and optimization of self-hosted, open-weight LLMs Drive model serving, quantization, inference optimization, GPU utilization, and performance Design and scale cloud and on-premises GPU infrastructure Lead infrastructure capacity planning, procurement, and vendor management Remain hands‑on with architecture and early solution development as the team grows Establish enterprise‑grade standards for scalable, reliable AI/ML systems What We’re Looking For: 10+ years of software, data, ML, or AI engineering experience 3+ years leading technical engineering teams Current hands‑on experience deploying production AI/ML systems at enterprise scale Deep experience with LLMs and self-hosting open-weight models, beyond commercial API integrations Experience designing and deploying agentic AI architectures Strong understanding of GPU infrastructure, model serving, inference optimization, and capacity planning Experience building engineering teams or technical functions from the ground up Strong Pluses: Databricks AI/ML experience within industrial, operational technology (OT), or safety‑critical environments Ontology or semantic modeling experience This role is ideal for an AI engineering leader who is still deeply technical and wants the opportunity to build the team, platform, and AI capabilities from the ground up. Direct hire with Benefits Location: Arlington, VA — full-time onsite #J-18808-Ljbffr