Head of AI Platform Engineering - Execution Plane

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America is seeking a Head of AI Platform Engineering – Execution Plane to lead the enterprise platform’s execution layer, manage agent runtimes, gateways, and MCP services, and drive automation across teams. You will own the roadmap for execution-plane capabilities while ensuring security, reliability, and low-latency operation.

Ideal candidates bring a strong background in distributed systems, AI/ML platforms, and leadership of software engineering teams,

Qualifications

• You must have a strong leadership background managing software engineering teams.
• You should have hands-on experience designing, building, and operating production-grade distributed systems.
• You will lead execution-layer capabilities and contribute to platform reliability and governance.

Responsibilities

• Lead development and implementation of the enterprise platform’s execution layer.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive automation and reduce costs.
• Own roadmap and delivery for execution plane capabilities including model gateways and runtimes.

Skills

People leadership

Distributed systems

AI/ML platforms

Platform execution

Roadmap ownership

Data access patterns

Security & compliance

CI/CD & automation

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in CS/Engineering/Management or related field

Job description

As the Head of AI Platform Engineering – Execution Plane, you will lead the development and implementation of our enterprise platform’s execution layer including management of agentic AI workloads, model gateways, agent runtimes, tool/action gateways, MCP servers, orchestration frameworks, or AI execution engines.

You will: You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and technology partners to develop and integrate automation solutions that drive business growth, improve customer experiences, and reduce operational costs.

Qualifications

You have:

Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, engineering, management or a related field.

Strong people leadership experience managing software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing senior technical talent.

Deep hands-on technical background designing, building, and operating production-grade distributed systems, AI/ML platforms, data platforms, or cloud-native runtime services.

Experience leading teams responsible for the execution layer of a platform, including runtime services, model inference, retrieval, orchestration, tool invocation, workflow execution, or production AI operations.

Ability to own the roadmap and delivery for execution plane capabilities such as model gateways, agent runtimes, tool/action gateways, runtime adapters, MCP services, knowledge bases, retrieval pipelines, inference services, and deployment patterns.

Strong understanding of data access patterns, enterprise APIs, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector/search systems, context engineering, and governed access to systems of record.

Experience building reliable, scalable, low-latency execution services with clear contracts, strong observability, graceful degradation, retry patterns, rate limits, and operational resilience.

Ability to partner with control plane, developer experience, data engineering, security, architecture, operations, and domain application teams to ensure execution technologies operate behind governed platform interfaces.

Proven ability to drive engineering excellence through design reviews, architecture standards, testing, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, incident response, SLOs, runbooks, and production support mechanisms.

Strong understanding of enterprise security and compliance requirements for runtime execution, including identity propagation, auditability, data handling, least privilege access, secrets management, and environment isolation.

Strong communication and