Senior Director, AI Engineering Lead

Coca-Cola; Atlanta (GA); On-site; USD 202,000 - 229,000; Full time

Job summary

The Coca-Cola Company seeks a Senior Director, AI Engineering Lead in Atlanta, GA to shape the enterprise AI engineering strategy and lead a team delivering secure, scalable AI across the digital product portfolio.

You will drive architectures, tooling, and reusable capabilities, partnering with Product, Data Science, and Core Technology to accelerate AI adoption while maintaining safety, reliability, and business impact.

Qualifications

• 8-10+ years of software or AI/ML engineering experience with team leadership, shipping production systems.
• Proven design, deployment, and operation of production AI systems, including ML pipelines and LLM-powered apps.
• Strong understanding of LLM-based systems, RAG, prompt engineering, and MCP/A2A interoperability.
• Hands-on backend engineering, API/service design, and cloud-native development; proficient in Python and at least one of Java/Go/C++.
• Experience with MLOps/LLMOps/AgentOps including deployment, monitoring, and governance practices.
• Familiarity with enterprise AI governance, model and prompt approvals, audit logging, and risk controls.
• Experience building AI capabilities for global, enterprise-scale products across markets.
• Proven ability to establish AI engineering patterns, conduct code reviews, and coach engineers.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management, able to influence senior leaders.

Responsibilities

• Define the enterprise AI engineering roadmap with Core Technology and Engineering teams.
• Build and lead a unified AI Engineering team supporting multiple products.
• Lead complex AI initiatives, guide model selection, prompts, retrieval/training pipelines, evaluation.
• Define enterprise AI architecture, reference patterns, and interoperability standards (MCP, A2A).
• Develop reusable SDKs, templates, CI/CD patterns, testing frameworks, and accelerators.
• Establish AI operating patterns: evaluation pipelines, observability, cost optimization, deployment.
• Define AI observability, telemetry, dashboards, and governance for safe, scalable production AI.
• Embed responsible AI with governance, guardrails, access controls, and audit trails.
• Advance digital twin capabilities with enterprise AI architectures and reusable capabilities.
• Collaborate with Product/Data/Core Technology to translate business goals into AI capabilities.
• Champion AI engineering excellence and upskill engineers across the organization.

Skills

Agile Methodology

Application Development

Budgeting

Business Processes

Business Value Creation

Change Management

Decision Making

Financial Forecasting

Leadership

Long Term Planning

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Office

Negotiation

Process Improvements

Risk Assessments

Risk Management

Software Development

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Strategic Alignment

Strategic IT

Structured Query Language (SQL)

Vendor Management

Waterfall Model

Education

BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical discipline

Tools

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Office

Job description

## Senior Director, AI Engineering LeadApply: US - GA - Atlanta: Full time: Posted Today: R-145103**Job Description Summary:****Role Overview**As part of the Product & Engineering team within Global Digital Network, the Senior Director, AI Engineering Lead will play a pivotal role in shaping how artificial intelligence is engineered, scaled, governed, and adopted across our key digital products portfolio. This role combines strategic technology leadership, organizational capability building, and deep technical expertise to accelerate the delivery of secure, scalable, and business-impacting artificial intelligence solutions.Reporting to the Head of Product Engineering and partnering closely with Product, Data Science, Technical Leads, and the Engineering Excellence Lead, you will define the AI engineering strategy, lead a team of AI Engineers, and establish the architectures, platform requirements, and reusable capabilities that enable AI at enterprise scale. You will ensure AI solutions are secure, scalable, production-ready, and seamlessly integrated into our product ecosystem, while shaping engineering standards, tooling, and best practices that accelerate AI adoption across the organization.The ideal candidate is a hands-on technical leader who combines deep AI engineering expertise with the ability to build teams and scale engineering capability. You have successfully designed, built, and operated production AI systems, evolved engineering practices based on rapidly changing AI capabilities, and coached engineers to deliver high-quality AI solutions. You balance innovation with pragmatism, making thoughtful trade-offs between speed, cost, reliability, safety, and maintainability.**What You’ll Do for Us*** **Define the enterprise AI engineering roadmap:**partner with Core Technology and Engineering teams to shape the evolution of AI platforms, orchestration and memory capabilities, developer tooling, reusable engineering services, and emerging AI frameworks that accelerate enterprise AI adoption* **Build and lead the AI Engineering team:**build, lead, and develop a shared team of AI Engineers supporting products across the portfolio. Grow the organization's AI engineering capability through hiring, coaching, technical mentorship, and career development. Foster a culture of engineering excellence, experimentation, and continuous learning* **Lead the organization's most complex AI engineering challenges:**operate as a player-coach by providing technical leadership on the organization's most complex AI initiatives. Partner with Tech Leads and engineering teams on model selection, prompt and agent architectures, retrieval and training pipelines, evaluation strategies, and other critical AI engineering decisions. Selectively contribute to the implementation of high-impact AI capabilities* **Define enterprise AI architecture and interoperability patterns:**establish reference architectures and reusable engineering patterns for semantic layers, knowledge graphs, context engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), GraphRAG, multi-agent systems, agent communication, tool orchestration, memory strategies, and secure interoperability using Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A), and emerging enterprise integration standards* **Advance reusable AI engineering capabilities:**develop reusable SDKs, templates, CI/CD patterns, testing frameworks, and engineering accelerators that enable product teams to build AI solutions consistently. Partner with Core Technology to ensure the underlying AI platform and orchestration capabilities support reliable and scalable enterprise deployment* **Define AI engineering operating patterns:**establish enterprise patterns for prompt lifecycle management, evaluation pipelines, observability, experimentation, cost optimization, deployment, and continuous improvement of AI agents in production. Define AI-specific deployment patterns and operational requirements that enable product teams to ship AI safely at scale* **Establish AI observability and operational excellence:**define enterprise-wide telemetry, tracing, runtime monitoring, reasoning diagnostics, token consumption analytics, operational dashboards, and evaluation frameworks for AI agents and LLM-powered applications. Continuously improve model quality, latency, token efficiency, runtime cost, observability, and business outcomes through experimentation and engineering optimization* **Embed responsible and governed AI:**partner with governance leads to implement evaluation, guardrails, monitoring, access controls, audit logging, human-in-the-loop workflows, and secure agent execution so AI products are safe, explainable, compliant, and trusted by business users* **Advance digital twin capabilities:**partner with Product, Data, and Core Technology teams to establish AI architectures and reusable capabilities that enable enterprise digital twin solutions across commercial and operational domains* **Partner across product and engineering:** work shoulder to shoulder with Product Managers, Product Owners, Tech Leads, the Engineering Excellence Lead, Data Science, Design, and Core Technology to translate business goals into AI capabilities, align technical direction, and ensure reusable AI capabilities are successfully adopted across the product portfolio* **Champion AI engineering excellence:**promote best practices, reusable components, tooling, and engineering patterns that accelerate AI delivery across squads. Help upskill engineers and continuously build AI engineering capability across the organization**Requirements & Qualifications*** BS or MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience* 8-10+ years of experience in software or AI/ML engineering, including 3+ years leading or managing engineering teams, with a track record of shipping production systems that serve real users at scale* Demonstrated experience designing, deploying, and operating production AI systems, including end-to-end ML pipelines, modern LLM-powered applications, and agentic AI solutions* Strong understanding of LLM-based systems, including agent architectures, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), tool and function calling, prompt engineering, evaluation methods, and AI interoperability using Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A), or similar standards* Hands-on expertise in backend engineering, API and service design, and cloud-native application development, with strong programming skills in Python and one or more of Java, Go, or C++* Hands-on experience with agentic AI frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, or equivalent, and with model providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Azure OpenAI* Experience with MLOps, LLMOps, or AgentOps practices, including prompt lifecycle management, evaluation, experimentation, deployment, monitoring, and production operations for AI systems* Familiarity with enterprise AI governance practices, including model and prompt approvals, audit logging, data classification, risk controls, and responsible AI* Experience building AI capabilities for global, enterprise-scale products used across multiple markets* Experience supporting enterprise digital twin capabilities or AI-enabled simulation environments* Proven ability to establish AI engineering patterns, conduct high-quality code reviews, and develop engineers through coaching, technical mentorship, and hiring* Excellent communication and storytelling skills, able to align engineers, partner with Product and Data Science, and influence senior stakeholders* Demonstrated willingness to remain hands-on when it matters most, rolling up your sleeves to tackle complex challenges while coaching others to deliver at a high standardThe Coca-Cola Company will not offer sponsorship for employment status (including, but not limited to, H1-B visa status and other employment-based nonimmigrant visas) for this position. Accordingly, all applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis and must not require The Coca-Cola Company's sponsorship to continue to work legally in the United States.**Skills:**Agile Methodology, Application Development, Budgeting, Business Processes, Business Value Creation, Change Management, Decision Making, Financial Forecasting, Leadership, Long Term Planning, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Office, Negotiation, Process Improvements, Risk Assessments, Risk Management, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Strategic Alignment, Strategic IT, Structured Query Language (SQL), Vendor Management, Waterfall Model**Pay Range:**United States: 202,000 - 229,000 USD*Base pay offered may vary depending on geography, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. A full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the position, is offered.***Annual Incentive Reference Value Percentage:**30*Annual Incentive reference value is a market-based competitive value for your role. It falls in the middle of the range for your role, indicating performance at target.***Location(s):**United States of America**City/Cities:**Atlanta**Travel Required:**00% - 25%**Relocation Provided:**Yes**Job Posting End Date:**September 27, 2026