Senior Director, AI Architecture and Engineering

Role Description

The IT organization at CrowdStrike is at the forefront of enabling the company’s rapid growth and technological innovation. We are looking for a Senior Director, AI Architecture & Engineering to architect and lead our next generation of AI agent capabilities that enhance productivity, create new internal capabilities, and unlock opportunities for additional revenue. This senior leader will own the strategic direction, roadmap, and execution of our AI agent portfolio across the enterprise. They will partner closely with business and technology leaders to reimagine how work gets done, while ensuring our solutions are scalable, secure, governed, and aligned to CrowdStrike’s long-term strategy.

We’re seeking a self-starter who thrives in ambiguity, has a proven track record building and leading high-performing global teams, communicates with executive-level clarity, and is passionate about staying on the frontier of AI.

What You’ll Do

• Set the enterprise AI agent strategy
  • Define the multi-year vision, roadmap, and success metrics for AI agents and automation across CrowdStrike.
  • Prioritize a portfolio of high-impact use cases that transform how internal teams operate and drive measurable business outcomes.
• Reimagine how work gets done
  • Act as a “work architect” for the enterprise: deeply understand the workflows of teams across the company and identify where agents and automation can have the greatest impact.
  • Lead change with empathy—design adoption strategies, communication, and training that acknowledge how disruptive new ways of working can be.
• Build and scale the AI Agent Development organization
  • Build, mentor, and scale a global AI Agent Developer team that supports functions across the company in creating and maintaining both low-code and high-code AI agents.
  • Establish operating models, standards, and best practices for how teams design, build, test, deploy, and maintain agents.
• Provide hands-on, technical leadership
  • Operate comfortably at both strategic and tactical levels—set direction while staying close to the work.
  • Contribute to agent architecture and development, review critical designs, and ensure the team remains on the technological edge.
• Define and govern AI and data architecture
  • Own the end-to-end architecture for AI agents and the underlying platform where they run, ensuring alignment with enterprise reference architectures, security, and governance standards.
  • Lead the design and build-out of the core AI agent platform and cloud operating environments, ensuring they are secure, scalable, observable, and cost-efficient.
  • Partner with platform, security, and data teams to define integration patterns, observability, performance, and resiliency requirements for agent-driven workflows.
  • Establish reusable components, frameworks, and patterns that accelerate safe, compliant agent development and deployment across teams.
• Drive performance, reliability, and ROI of agents
  • Lead the development of evaluation datasets, monitoring frameworks, and performance metrics for key agents.
  • Oversee processes for continuously improving agents based on usage patterns, feedback, and cost/benefit analysis.
  • Guide buy vs. build decisions, including the evaluation and selection of external vendors and platforms.
• Lead within the AI Center of Excellence
  • Be a key leader in the AI Center of Excellence, sharing expertise to help teams across CrowdStrike build better agents.
  • Support and shape company-wide AI training and enablement initiatives.
  • Stay on the frontier of AI and advise on the adoption of new models, methods, and tools, including safety and governance approaches.
• Shape AI governance, risk, and compliance
  • Partner with Security, Legal, Compliance, and Data teams to ensure AI agents adhere to modern AI safety, security, and governance practices.
  • Help define standards, guardrails, and approval processes for agent deployment and usage.

Qualifications

• Extensive Data Science and AI leadership experience
  • 15+ years of experience in data science and/or AI.
  • 7+ years in senior leadership roles leading engineering, data science, or AI/ML organizations, ideally in high-growth, distributed environments.
  • Demonstrated success setting strategy and executing complex, cross-functional technology programs.
• Deep experience with AI agents (low-code and high-code)
  • Proven experience leading the development of canonical AI agents that support essential work across the company.
  • Ability to design and deliver agents that are cost-effective, resilient, and integrated into the day-to-day workflows of business and technical teams.
• Proven track record evaluating, monitoring, and improving agents for ROI
  • Experience designing evaluation datasets, KPIs, and feedback loops to monitor performance and quality of production agents.
  • Experience driving buy vs. build decisions and evaluating external vendors and platforms.
  • Strong analytical skills to understand usage patterns, adoption, and cost, and to translate insights into clear recommendations.
• Enterprise team-building and people leadership
  • Experience building and leading global, distributed engineering and AI teams.
  • Demonstrated ability to attract, develop, and retain top talent, while fostering a culture of accountability, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
  • Strong executive presence and communication skills; able to influence and align senior stakeholders across functions.
• Python expertise
  • 8+ years of hands-on Python experience, with strong understanding of data structures, security best practices, and modern development practices.
  • Habit of using AI for code-assist and productivity in your own work.
• Agent SDKs and platforms
  • Experience with major agent and LLM platforms such as Vertex, OpenAI, Claude, etc., and familiarity with MCP or similar orchestration frameworks.
• Machine learning foundations
  • Solid foundational knowledge of machine learning concepts, including how modern LLMs and retrieval-augmented systems work in practice.
• Cloud data warehouses and platforms
  • Experience with Snowflake, AWS, GCP, or Azure, with strong understanding of data services, performance, and scaling strategies for data-intensive AI workloads.
• Educator and evangelist mindset
  • Passion for AI and a desire to upskill team members across all functions.
  • Experience creating enablement materials, running workshops, or otherwise helping non-experts adopt AI safely and effectively.
• Understanding of GenAI, safety, and governance
  • Solid understanding of how LLMs and GenAI systems work under the hood and how that informs good agent design.
  • Familiarity with modern AI safety, governance, and risk management approaches.
• Lifelong learner
  • Demonstrated ability to continuously adapt as new AI capabilities, tools, and paradigms emerge.
  • Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science or related field; MBA a plus.
• Architecture leadership and systems design
  • Proven experience designing and governing enterprise-scale architectures for AI and data-intensive systems, including security, observability, and reliability considerations.
  • Expertise in integration patterns (APIs, event-driven architectures, microservices) and how agents interact safely and reliably with transactional and analytic systems.
  • Experience defining reference architectures, standards, and guardrails for AI agents, including identity, access control, data residency, and performance.
  • Familiarity with MLOps and platform engineering concepts (CI/CD for models and agents, monitoring, incident response, rollback strategies).

Benefits

• Market leader in compensation and equity awards
• Comprehensive physical and mental wellness programs
• Competitive vacation and holidays for recharge
• Paid parental and adoption leaves
• Professional development opportunities for all employees regardless of level or role
• Employee Networks, geographic neighborhood groups, and volunteer opportunities to build connections
• Vibrant office culture with world class amenities
• Great Place to Work Certified™ across the globe