Director of Engineering (AI Practice) at Egen

Role Overview

What You'll Do:

• Span Leadership and People Management

• Practice Machinery: Hiring, Onboarding, and Enablement

• Hands-on Delivery and Client Engagement

Span Leadership and People Management

• Empower and lead a dedicated span of roughly twenty world-class engineers.

• Drive performance management, professional growth, career paths, and promotion pathways for everyone in your span in close alignment with the practice lead.

• Serve as the primary leadership point of escalation for engineering challenges within your span.

• Direct team staffing strategy in partnership with Resource Management and the practice lead, seamlessly matching engineering talent to high-impact engagements.

• Oversee contractor operations to ensure smooth onboarding, strategic contract extensions, and healthy engagement delivery.

• Mentor and coach team leads through crucial career conversations, performance coaching, and complex staffing decisions.

Practice Machinery: Hiring, Onboarding, and Enablement

• Spearhead the practice-wide hiring engine in collaboration with the practice lead: optimize interview panels, calibrate interviewer standards, expand capacity, prioritize top candidates, and elevate our partnership with Talent Acquisition.

• Champion the entire career progression pipeline from onboarding to senior technical leader—refining mentorship, management enablement, and performance review cycles on top of existing practice frameworks.

• Lead the practice's internal accelerator program alongside the practice lead, defining production-ready client standards, driving practice-wide adoption, and curating internal assets.

Hands-on Delivery and Client Engagement

• Maintain an active billable portfolio (~50% focus) across strategic, fractional advisory and platform consulting roles spread intentionally across key client accounts.

• Provide overarching technical leadership on AI SDLC initiatives—guiding client leadership in adopting modern AI tooling, setting standards of excellence, and measuring ROI.

• Drive robust AI governance solutions within highly regulated industries, establishing comprehensive evaluation frameworks, observability platforms, audit trails, and production safety controls.

• Architect enterprise platform and pipeline deployments, including agentic AI frameworks, automated promotion pipelines, and the operational infrastructure supporting them.

• Serve as a trusted executive advisor to client engineering leaders, delivering expert guidance and constructively challenging technical approaches when needed.

What We're Looking For (Basic Qualifications)

• 12+ years of progressive engineering experience, including significant leadership experience guiding full engineering organizations rather than single development teams.

• Demonstrated experience managing engineering leaders and managers, with a track record of scaling teams and organizational structures effectively.

• Proven ability to build high-functioning organizational infrastructure—recruiting engines, onboarding programs, engineering standards, and career pathways—with measurable outcomes.

• Deep technical strength in platform, pipeline, and infrastructure architecture required to command respect and direct technical strategy in executive client settings.

• Hands-on expertise deploying production AI/ML systems, with a primary focus on platform architecture, MLOps/LLMOps pipelines, governance, and operational resilience over pure model research.

• Deep Google Cloud Platform (GCP) experience, or the proven technical agility to master our GCP-centric delivery stack rapidly.

• Sharp consulting acumen: adept at managing ambiguity, navigating client-facing dynamics, leading concurrent engagements, and balancing business drivers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Professional services experience preferred.

• Collaborative mindset and comfort partnering closely with practice leadership during a transitional quarter as operational authority shifts.

• Exceptional communication and executive presence, with the ability to influence C-suite client stakeholders and internal executive leadership alike.