Optimizing business performance through people, data, tech & analytics
Director, AI Engineering – Data Science
Location
Maryland
Posted
52 days ago
Salary
0
Seniority
Lead
Job Description
Director, AI Engineering – Data Science
Blend360
• Define technical investments with business objectives • Mentor, and manage AI/ML engineers, senior data scientists, and MLOps engineers—setting performance expectations and a high-performance culture. • Partner with cross-functional leaders to prioritize initiatives, allocate resources, and measure organizational impact. • Establish engineering standards, code review practices, and model governance frameworks across the AI org. • Serve as the technical authority on deep learning architecture—personally leading the design and development of custom transformer models for sequence modeling, customer propensity scoring, audience segmentation, and churn prediction. • Drive innovation in attention mechanisms, positional encodings, and tokenization strategies specifically suited to tabular, time-series, and event-stream data common in marketing and telecom. • Oversee adaptation and fine-tuning of foundation models (BERT, T5, TabTransformer, LLMs) for proprietary client datasets, ensuring domain-specific performance. • Champion reproducible experimentation and architectural decision documentation across the team. • Oversee end-to-end data science workflows: problem framing, feature engineering, model development, validation, and production deployment. • Ensure statistical rigor in experimental design, causal inference, A/B testing, and offline/online evaluation frameworks. • Guide the team in building robust data pipelines for large-scale structured and unstructured datasets, including clickstream, CRM, ad telemetry, CDRs, and network KPIs. • Lead technical discovery and solutioning with enterprise clients translating ambiguous business problems into well-scoped AI initiatives. • Present AI strategy, model results, and roadmap updates to C-suite and senior client stakeholders with clarity and executive presence. • Contribute to business development: support RFP responses, lead technical portions of client proposals, and help grow the AI engineering practice. • Establish production standards for model deployment, monitoring, drift detection, and automated retraining across cloud platforms (AWS SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI, Azure ML). • Drive adoption of MLOps best practices including CI/CD for ML, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and experiment tracking (MLflow, W&B, DVC). • Implement model governance, explainability, and responsible AI standards in compliance with client and regulatory requirements.
Job Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a closely related quantitative field; Ph.D. strongly preferred.
- 10+ years of progressive experience in data science and machine learning, with at least 3–5 years in a people management or technical leadership role (Director, Sr. Manager, or Principal Engineer level).
- Proven track record of leading high-performing AI/ML engineering teams in a fast-paced, client-facing or product environment.
- Deep, hands-on expertise designing and training custom transformer architectures from scratch—not only fine-tuning pre-built checkpoints, but architecting novel attention mechanisms, embedding strategies, and model topologies.
- Strong applied data science foundation: feature engineering, statistical modeling, causal inference, and experimental design across large-scale datasets.
- Proficiency in Python and core ML/DL libraries: PyTorch (preferred), TensorFlow, HuggingFace Transformers, scikit-learn, XGBoost/LightGBM.
- Direct experience with industry datasets in marketing & media (DSP/DMP logs, ad impression data, attribution pipelines, MMM) OR telecommunications (CDRs, network KPIs, subscriber behavior, churn datasets).
- Command of SQL and large-scale data platforms: Spark, BigQuery, Snowflake, or Databricks.
- Experience owning end-to-end MLOps: cloud deployment (SageMaker, Vertex AI, or Azure ML), monitoring, CI/CD for ML, and model governance.
- Exceptional executive communication skills—able to translate complex model behavior into business language for C-suite and client audiences.
Benefits
- Flexible work arrangements
- Professional development
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