Director of Engineering, Applied AI

Division Story A+E’s Technology team is deep-rooted in the heart of our business. We have great people and great technologies, and together we take on the toughest challenges. As innovators, we choose to iterate, pivot, and adapt quickly. We’ve reinvented the way A+E leverages technology to produce and sell world-class content. We’ve modernized our core solutions and embraced a cloud first approach. Perched on the virtues of our “Technology Code”, we make technology better, create solutions together, and most of all, we have fun with it. Our team members are motivated individuals who help each other do remarkable things every day. Together we deliver best-in-class solutions that transform the way A+E works. If this sounds like something you want to be a part of, we want to hear from you! Job Description THE ROLE: Director of Engineering, Applied AI – A+E Global Media is seeking a strategic and hands‑on leader to design, develop, and deliver AI‑driven capabilities across our technology platforms. Reporting to the VP, Corporate Application Engineering & Enterprise Data, you will scale our Applied AI and generative AI initiatives and collaborate with product, data, and business teams to bring next‑generation media experiences to life. More of What You’ll Do Applied AI Engineering Leadership Drive the technical roadmap for Applied AI across key enterprise applications and business workflows. Evaluate and implement cutting‑edge AI techniques, frameworks, and best practices including LLMs to keep the team at the forefront of innovation and leverage the best available tools for media and entertainment use cases. Drive development of custom AI solutions using Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and model fine‑tuning to meet business‑specific needs across departments, defining evaluation criteria and benchmarks to ensure performance, grounding, and reliability. Design and lead systems that extract value from large structured and unstructured datasets—including PDFs in S3, SharePoint documents, and emails—using LLMs, RAG, RLHF, and enterprise‑scale modern AI techniques. Build Agentic AI systems that streamline and automate workflows using LLMs. Cultivate a culture of experimentation, engineering rigor, and inclusiveness where bold ideas are tested quickly and learned from openly. Delivery & Cross‑Functional Collaboration Oversee the full lifecycle of Agentic AI applications, from prototyping and data exploration through model integration, orchestration, deployment, monitoring, and retraining. Partner with Data Engineering and Data Science teams to design robust, reusable data pipelines and experimentation workflows that accelerate Applied AI initiatives. Drive AI‑enabled data accessibility across the organization, delivering solutions and tooling that empower stakeholders at all levels—from analysts to senior executives—to extract actionable insights. Partner with Product and Business Analysts to co‑develop AI‑enabled features and prioritize high‑impact initiatives. Work closely with Application Engineering teams to embed Agentic AI into production systems, improve user experience, and ensure seamless integration, scalability, and long‑term maintainability. Operational Excellence Drive engineering excellence and delivery cadence across the AI stack—observability, latency, model monitoring, evaluation harnesses, rollback paths, and sprint‑level prioritization across concurrent workstreams. Build and maintain scalable, cloud‑based AI infrastructure that supports rapid experimentation, model serving, and cost‑controlled inference at media‑scale workloads. Champion responsible AI development aligned with privacy, IP, copyright, and ethical standards—particularly relevant for media content and audience data. Basic Requirements Required 8 or more years of technology engineering work experience, including 2+ years in Applied AI software integration. 3 or more years of team leadership experience. Experience with Python and/or Typescript/Javascript; well‑versed in SQL. Experience working with LLM provider APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini) and frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, AI SDK) to build agentic or multi‑agent AI workflows. Experience building and deploying AI‑powered applications at scale, focusing on applying large language models to real‑world products and workflows. Experience working with Agentic AI, Embeddings, RAG, RLHF, and other AI techniques at enterprise scale. Experience designing or applying evals on systems built on top of LLMs, including prompt testing, grounding, hallucination detection, and performance benchmarking. Excellent communication skills and experience working on cross‑functional initiatives. Preferred Experience with agentic AI harnesses and orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, Semantic Kernel) for building, managing, and deploying multi‑agent systems. Experience with big data and data warehouse projects. Familiarity with vector databases and RAG pipelines (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, ChromaDB, pgvector) for LLM‑powered applications. Experience building full‑stack AI‑powered applications using modern web frameworks (e.g., Next.js, React) to deliver user‑facing AI products and internal tooling. Hands‑on experience with ML/deep learning libraries (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face Transformers, Scikit‑learn) and deploying models to production. Experience with MLOps tooling (e.g., MLflow, Weights & Biases, Kubeflow) and cloud ML platforms (e.g., AWS SageMaker, Google Vertex AI, Azure ML). Familiarity with data engineering tools and platforms (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, Apache Spark, dbt, Kafka). Familiarity with data privacy, copyright, and ethical issues in Applied AI applications. Experience in the media, entertainment, ad‑tech, mar‑tech, or publishing industry. Compensation Annual Pay Range: $188,034 - $220,000 Annual Incentive Target: 17.5% A+E Global Media offers a competitive total compensation package, which includes healthcare coverage, 401(k) matching, and a range of other benefits. Equal Employment Opportunity Statement A+E Global Media proudly provides equal employment opportunity for all employees and job applicants and makes employment decisions consistent with this principle. The company’s employment actions and decisions— including recruitment, hiring, training, promotion, demotion, compensation, transfer, layoff, and termination—are made without regard to an employee’s race, color, religion, creed, age, national origin, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and related medical conditions), gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, alienage or citizenship status, physical and/or mental disability, medical condition, family and medical leave status, genetic information, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. A+E Global Media is a joint venture of the Hearst Corporation and The Walt Disney Company. We are proud to be an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer/disabled/veterans. #J-18808-Ljbffr A+E Global Media