Director, Internal AI Operations

LaunchDarkly; Oakland (CA); On-site; USD 229,000 - 315,000; Full time

Job summary

LaunchDarkly seeks a strategic, execution-oriented Director of Internal AI Operations to scale the company’s AI initiatives, establish operational objectives, and turn AI into a measurable business capability.

You will lead reporting, portfolio management, reviews, policy operations, and transformation efforts across Finance, IT, Security, Legal, and product teams, driving governance and value realization.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of progressively responsible experience in AI or technology operations, enterprise systems, data and analytics, FinOps, governance, transformation, or related field, including 5+ years leading teams or complex cross-functional programs.
• Demonstrated success designing, implementing, or scaling an operating model across multiple functions, with clear ownership, policies, processes, metrics, governance, and measurable outcomes.
• Experience managing an enterprise portfolio of AI or technology tools, vendors, integrations, or platforms, including lifecycle management, access and administration, risk and controls, contracts, usage, and spend.
• Strong financial, analytical, and data-driven mindset, with experience using tools such as Snowflake, Excel, Python, or equivalent; able to define adoption, efficiency, ROI, and business-value metrics.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including explaining complex topics to senior leaders and persuading diverse stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Reporting: Build visibility into AI spend and usage; develop metrics and report on tool overlap, cost drivers, and risks.
• Portfolio management: Maintain inventory of AI tools, initiatives, vendors, integrations, owners, spend, and dependencies.
• Reviews: Manage Internal AI Feature Review process with inputs from Security, Legal, IT, and business owners.
• Policy operations: Develop and maintain Internal AI Policy with Legal and Security; implement approved changes.
• Transformation and migration: Track AI roadmap, migrations, platform dependencies, adoption milestones, resourcing, risks, and decisions.
• Partnership with technology teams: Collaborate on new AI product initiatives and value delivery.
• Administration and audit: Define and audit access, configuration, data controls, logging, retention, vendor settings.
• Communications and enablement: Own AI comms calendar, updates, FAQs, launch materials, training coordination, policy communications.
• CoE coordination: Establish cadence and artifacts across distributed AI CoEs without central ownership.

Skills

Strategic leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Finance and budgeting

Data analysis

AI governance

Vendor management

Change management

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Snowflake

Excel

Python

Job description

LaunchDarkly is looking for a strategic, execution-oriented Director of Internal AI Operations to run and continuously improve how our company adopts and scales AI, establish the operational objectives, processes, and work plans that turn AI from a collection of tools into a measurable business capability and work with leaders across several functions to put the company’s AI direction into practice.

Responsibilities:

• Reporting: Build and maintain visibility into AI spend and usage. Develop adoption, efficiency, and cost metrics and report on tool overlap, cost drivers, and open risks. Support Finance with forecasting, budget tracking, anomaly detection, and vendor and model-cost optimization. Functional and technical leaders own efficiency, waste, cost, usage, and ROI within their portfolios; AI Operations prepares regular reporting and flags performance gaps for follow-up.
• Portfolio management: Maintain the inventory of AI tools, initiatives, agents, vendors, integrations, owners, status, spend, risks, and dependencies. Establish the processes and standards that keep it accurate across teams.
• Reviews: Participate in reviewing new AI Vendor requests and own and manage the Internal AI Feature Review process from intake through decision, conditions, approval, exception, or rejection, coordinating inputs from Security, Legal, IT, and business owners.
• Policy operations: Develop and maintain the company’s Internal AI Policy supporting resources with Legal and Security, and the Executive team, along with supporting resources. Recommend policy changes and put approved changes into operation.
• Transformation and migration: Track the AI roadmap, migrations, platform dependencies, adoption milestones, resourcing, risks, and executive decisions.
• Partnership with our technology teams: Collaborate on new AI product initiatives, empowering our product teams with how they identify and deliver value around AI.
• Administration and audit: Define and audit standards for access, ownership, configuration, data controls, logging, retention, vendor settings, and offboarding.
• Communications and enablement: Own the Internal AI communications calendar, stakeholder updates, FAQs, launch materials, training coordination, and policy-change communications.
• CoE coordination: Establish a common cadence and minimum artifacts across distributed AI CoEs without centralizing their technical or domain ownership.

Qualifications:

• 15+ years of progressively responsible experience in AI or technology operations, enterprise systems, data and analytics, FinOps, governance, transformation, or a related field, including 5+ years leading teams or complex cross-functional programs.
• Demonstrated success designing, implementing, or scaling an operating model across multiple functions, including clear ownership, policies, processes, metrics, governance, and measurable outcomes.
• Experience managing an enterprise portfolio of AI or technology tools, vendors, integrations, or platforms, including lifecycle management, access and administration, risk and controls, contracts, usage, and spend.
• Strong financial, analytical, and data-driven mindset, with experience using tools such as Snowflake, Excel, Python, or equivalent; able to define adoption, efficiency, unit economics, ROI, and business-value metrics and turn complex data into executive-ready recommendations.
• Strong financial and operational acumen, with experience building spend visibility, forecasts, budget controls, vendor or model-cost optimization, cost avoidance, waste reduction, and value-improvement plans.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex topics clearly, present recommendations to senior and executive leaders, and persuade diverse stakeholders.
• Experience influencing functional and technical leaders without relying on direct authority, clarifying distributed accountability, benchmarking performance, challenging tradeoffs, and driving follow-through across global, remote, and cross-functional teams.
• Curiosity and a willingness to lean into AI: able to learn emerging capabilities quickly, experiment pragmatically, identify high-value use cases, and apply sound judgment about where AI should and should not be used.
• Practical understanding of responsible AI, data governance, privacy, security, vendor risk, and change management, with the judgment to balance innovation, control, scalability, and business value.
• Strong systems thinking, program management, prioritization, and change leadership skills; comfortable bringing structure to ambiguous, company-wide problems.
• Experience hiring, coaching, or developing effective teams and building trusted partnerships across Finance, IT, Security, Legal, Procurement, and business functions.

What Success Looks Like:

• Accelerate teams’ work through measurable improvements in cycle time, throughput, or capacity unlocked by AI.
• Partner with functional leaders to demonstrate business value from priority AI use cases—not just increased usage.
• Reduce friction from idea to responsible launch, measured by faster reviews, clearer decisions, and fewer stalled initiatives.
• Improve AI portfolio efficiency through stronger utilization, reduced duplication, and better cost per user or workflow.
• Establish trusted, scalable governance, with clear ownership, timely reviews, and consistent execution of required controls.

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level M4:

• Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle -$269,400 - 370,480*
• Zone 2:Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $242,500 - 333,410**
• Zone 3: All other US locations - $229,000 - 314,930*
• All Zones inclusive of 15% Bonus Target

LaunchDarkly operates from a place of high trust and transparency; we are happy to state the pay range for our open roles to best align with your needs. Exact compensation may vary based on skills, experience, and location.

*Within the United States, our geographic pay zones are defined by counties surrounding major metropolitan areas.
**Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits in addition to salary.

About LaunchDarkly:

Modern software delivery was supposed to be the foundation for a thriving digital business but reality has proven otherwise. Slow, inefficient development cycles, costly outages, and fragmented customer experiences are preventing developers from building their best software. The LaunchDarkly platform helps developers innovate on new features faster while protecting them with a safety valve to instantly rewind when things go wrong. Developers can target product experiences to any customer segment and maximize the business impact of every feature. And by gradually rolling out new application components, they escape nightmare "big-bang" technology migrations.

The LaunchDarkly platform was built to guide engineers to the next frontier of DevOps by:

• Improving the velocity and stability of software releases, without the fear of end customer outages
• Delivering targeted experiences by easily personalizing features to customer cohorts
• Maximizing the business impact of every feature through the ability to experiment and optimize
• Coordinating the release and optimization of software to provide consistent experiences across mobile platforms and device types
• Improving the effectiveness and productivity of engineering teams, by providing insights into engineering cadence and stability

At LaunchDarkly, we believe in the power of teams. We're building a team that is humble, open, collaborative, respectful and kind. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. LD invites any applicant to review our written Affirative Action Plan. To do so, contact People Ops at [e-mail] .

We do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.