Head of Retail AI Platform

Role Description

The Head of Retail AI Platform is the senior leader accountable for an AI-native retail decisioning platform end-to-end — strategy, roadmap, delivery, team, governance, and commercial outcome. The platform delivers a portfolio of product suites and agents to merchandising, supply chain, finance, supplier collaboration, and executive-insight users, operating a multi-million-baht programme with a senior engineering team. Remote candidates outside of Thailand are welcome to apply.

• Own the platform roadmap end-to-end — phased multi-release delivery, suite sequencing, agent prioritisation, budget vs scope; resolve open strategic and architectural decisions on documented timelines.
• Run the platform operating model — Steering Committee, Architecture Review Board, AI governance reviews, cost review, data-product contracts review — with executive sponsors and peer technology directors.
• Lead phased multi-release delivery across an 18–24-month horizon — foundation launch, supplier-collaboration suite, retail-operations and executive-insights suites, then commerce-intelligence suite — each with measurable commercial outcomes.
• Lead recruitment of the engineering leadership team and the broader IC team; set engineering culture (domain-driven design, agent-native, retail-specific, human-in-the-loop by default).
• Own the peer-platform interface — data platform / engineering / governance — operationalise the service contracts (LLM gateway, knowledge graph, data products) and resolve scope-overlap escalations.
• Chair governance for agent autonomy progression (shadow / recommender / executor patterns) with measurable criteria and stakeholder sign-off.
• Own the commercial narrative with executive sponsors — quarterly business review, ROI tracking, budget burn, run-cost trajectory; defend the platform to the CFO office.
• Manage risk — capital exposure on build vs buy, vendor lock-in, regulatory exposure, delivery slippage — with a documented register and clear mitigations.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related discipline.
• 12+ years in software / data / AI engineering with 5+ years in a senior leadership role (Director / Head / VP) accountable for product delivery and team P&L.
• Shipped AI-native products at scale — agentic systems, ML platforms, decisioning engines, or comparable — with demonstrable commercial outcomes, not just demos.
• Strong technical depth in at least one of: agent runtimes (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen), LLM platforms, classical ML deployment at scale, lakehouse architectures, knowledge graphs.
• Programme governance experience — chairing steering committees, presenting to executive sponsors, managing capital budgets at the tens-of-millions scale.
• Built and retained engineering teams at 20+ FTE scale in Southeast Asia.
• Cross-functional partnership — has navigated peer-platform organisations, Legal / DPO, InfoSec, CFO office.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; speaks finance, technology, and business with equal credibility.

Preferred Qualifications

• Retail technology background — POS, replenishment, merchandising, loyalty, supply chain.
• Regulated-AI experience (banking, healthcare, public sector); multi-cloud or hybrid production environments.
• Open-source platform leadership; public speaking / thought leadership in AI or agentic systems.
• Executive education in AI strategy or digital transformation (MIT Sloan, INSEAD, Stanford or comparable).