AI Systems & Platforms Director

Slalom; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 215,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, & vision coverage

401(k) with match

Paid time off & holidays

Well-being reimbursement

Job summary

Slalom is seeking a Director of AI Systems and Platforms to lead a portfolio of client delivery and capability responsibilities while remaining an active technical leader.

You will mentor AI/ML engineers, architects, and data scientists; shape and sell complex work; manage capability health; and help teams design, build, and operate production AI systems across multiple platforms and MLOps practices.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in AI, ML, data science, software engineering, or related field with production systems.
• 8+ years of software engineering delivering production services.
• 5+ years in technical leadership, people leadership, or capability management.
• 2+ years hands-on GenAI/LLM/agentic AI in production.
• Strong Python and SQL coding, able to review production code and guide tradeoffs.
• Deep experience with RAG and agentic architectures (embeddings, vector search, memory, orchestration).
• Experience across at least two major cloud/data AI ecosystems; capable of selecting technologies by context.
• Experience designing production-grade MLOps/LLMOps: CI/CD, IaC, evaluation, monitoring, security, governance, FinOps.

Responsibilities

• Lead complex AI/ML engagements; contribute to discovery, architecture, rapid prototypes, and production issue resolution.
• Architect, prototype, and productionize agentic AI, RAG, predictive ML, optimization, and intelligent workflows.
• Develop production code in Python/SQL; apply testing, version control, secure coding, and repeatable builds.
• Define and enforce production quality standards, guardrails, privacy, latency, and reliability.
• Lead engagements from opportunity discovery through deployment and operational transition.
• Partner with product, data, security, risk, and change leaders to ensure responsible AI adoption.

Skills

Python

SQL

Leadership

Architecture decisions

GenAI

RAG systems

Cloud platforms

MLOps/LLMOps

Communication skills

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Job description

Slalom is seeking a Director of AI Systems and Platforms to lead a portfolio of client delivery and capability responsibilities while remaining an active technical leader.

You will mentor AI/ML engineers, architects, and data scientists; shape and sell complex work; manage capability health; and help teams design, build, and operate production AI systems across multiple platforms and MLOps practices.