Director of AI

Harnham; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Harnham is seeking a Director of AI to shape and lead a global AI transformation. You will work hands-on with engineers to build production AI systems, scale intelligent agents, and define the architecture that supports both customer-facing products and internal operations.

You will partner with senior technology leadership, set direction, influence executives, and build a focused AI team. The role demands experience at organizational scale and a proven ability to deliver practical AI solutions

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering leadership experience, with hands-on AI transformation at scale.
• Crucial track record shipping production AI systems and influencing executives.
• Experience building agentic AI and production-grade AI architectures.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the company’s AI strategy in partnership with tech leadership.
• Design and scale intelligent agents that automate business processes end-to-end.
• Establish AI platforms, reference architectures and engineering standards.
• Own production AI initiatives from pilot to production and governance.
• Incorporate AI into customer-facing products and internal operations.
• Identify value through automation, ROI, and cost optimization.
• Manage AI vendors and pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions.

Skills

Software engineering leadership

Agentic AI

Production AI systems

AI governance

n8n

Tools

n8n

Job description

Function: Artificial Intelligence / Engineering

Level: Director

The Opportunity

We’re partnering with a global, technology-led organization undergoing a major data and AI transformation to hire a Director of AI.

The business operates at significant global scale, serving thousands of customers across 60+ countries, but its AI function is intentionally being built as a small, highly capable team. This is an opportunity to have genuine influence over how AI is deployed across an established organization without inheriting a large, slow-moving structure.

The mandate is ambitious: build AI into both customer-facing products and the way the organization operates internally, with a particular focus on intelligent agents capable of executing real business processes end-to-end.

This is not an AI strategy role where you sit above the technology. You’ll be expected to remain technically credible and hands-on, working alongside engineers on architecture and design while simultaneously setting direction, influencing executives and building the AI function.

What You’ll Own

You’ll partner closely with senior technology leadership to define and execute the company’s AI strategy, including:

• Agentic AI: Design and scale intelligent agents capable of executing complex business processes, including tool access, context management, control flow, error recovery, guardrails and human-in-the-loop decision making.
• AI platforms & architecture: Establish the frameworks, reference architectures and engineering standards that future AI capabilities will be built upon.
• Production AI: Own approaches around RAG, model selection, MCP/A2A integrations, evaluations, regression testing and moving AI systems successfully from pilot into production.
• Customer-facing AI: Build increasingly sophisticated AI capabilities into external products, including intelligent insights and recommendations.
• Operational automation: Identify high-value opportunities where AI can reduce repetitive service work and improve both efficiency and customer experience.
• AI economics: Make informed decisions around model selection, inference costs, model routing, self-hosting and build-versus-buy.
• Governance & security: Ensure AI systems operate within enterprise security, privacy and regulatory requirements, including preparation for the EU AI Act and ISO/IEC 42001.
• AI adoption: Help the wider organization understand how to use AI effectively through education, internal tools and change management.
• Team building: Initially work with a small contractor group before building a focused team of AI and ML Engineers.

What We’re Looking For

This role needs someone who can operate comfortably between the boardroom and the architecture discussion.

You’ll likely bring 10+ years of software engineering leadership experience, including significant experience leading AI transformation at organizational scale. Director of AI JD

Crucially, you should have personally built and shipped production AI systems, rather than only overseeing teams doing the work. Experience with agentic systems, production RAG, agent integrations such as MCP/A2A, evaluation frameworks and production AI architecture will be particularly relevant. Director of AI JD

You should also be comfortable:

• Leading a mixture of permanent engineers and contractors.
• Working directly with executive stakeholders and communicating both the possibilities and limitations of AI.
• Making pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions and managing AI vendors.
• Assessing whether a problem genuinely requires AI or whether a simpler solution would deliver better ROI.
• Operating within enterprise cybersecurity, privacy and AI-governance requirements.
• Working in a fast-moving environment where the technology changes faster than the documentation.

Particularly Interesting Experience

Experience building ML models from the ground up, a strong data science foundation, multi-tenant customer-facing AI products, workflow automation platforms such as n8n, or AI within travel, hospitality or logistics would all be advantageous.

Why Consider It?

This is a chance to join at an unusually interesting point: the foundations are already being built, executive sponsorship for AI is strong, but the AI organization itself is still at the beginning of its journey.

You won’t inherit a finished strategy or a 50-person team. You’ll inherit real production problems, an aggressive roadmap and the opportunity to build a small AI function capable of having an outsized impact across a global business.

If you’re an AI leader who still wants to build, challenge assumptions and ship, rather than simply manage from a distance, we’d be interested in speaking with you.