Director of AI Engineering & Platform Strategy

McKinstry

Seattle (WA)

On-site

USD 166,000 - 252,000

Full time

6 days ago

Be an early applicant

Get more replies from employers

Send a job-specific resume in minutes.

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

401(k) with employer match

Paid time off and holidays

Parental leave

Job summary

McKinstry in Seattle, WA is seeking a Director of AI Engineering to own the development of the company’s core AI technology and the platform it runs on. You will lead the enterprise engineering function, define the technical strategy and reference architecture, and oversee production operations that keep released systems trusted.

You will shepherd the build-versus-buy decisions, drive model governance, and coordinate with leadership on roadmaps.

Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field.
15+ years in software engineering with hands-on experience shipping and operating production systems.
Experience building and operating AI or ML applications in production (LLM apps, agents, RAG, evaluation).
Platform depth: agent harness/runtime and provider abstraction across cost, latency, and data sovereignty.
Experience managing a team of 5+ direct reports (or 10+ including matrixed contributors).
Fluent in modern cloud and AI delivery engineering (Azure, APIs, CI/CD, LLMOps, observability).
Security-by-design discipline: data residency, model-access governance, prompt-injection defense, and output validation.

Responsibilities

Own AI technical strategy and reference architecture for the portfolio.
Build and operate McKinstry’s core AI platform including agent harness and governance.
Lead build/buy/host decisions for models and vendor integrations.
Set engineering standards and production readiness practices across teams.
Recruit and develop AI, ML, software, and platform engineers; manage budgets and delivery culture.
Ensure security-by-design and data protection are embedded in systems.