Director, AI Chief Engineer – Process Excellence

HARMAN International

full-time

Posted on: 9/30/2025

Location Type: Hybrid

Location: Novi • Connecticut, Missouri • 🇺🇸 United States

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Salary

💰 $185,250 - $271,700 per year

Job Level

Lead

Tech Stack

AirflowAWSAzureBigQueryCloudGoogle Cloud PlatformKafkaPulsarPythonSparkSQL

About the role

Lead the architecture and development of AI platforms focused on internal process excellence
Partner with the Automotive Principal Architect to define architecture, tools, and processes for AI/ML adoption globally
Manage a team of five AI practitioners and mentor global teams implementing AI solutions
Design and implement advanced AI solutions requiring cross–value-stream orchestration
Lead development of end-to-end data platforms for agentic AI training, evaluation, and reinforcement
Build scalable, real-time pipelines to ingest, transform, and store multimodal data (text, logs, user interactions, actions, environments)
Design dynamic memory and knowledge systems (vector stores, graph DBs, memory stores)
Collaborate with researchers to integrate live feedback, human-in-the-loop data, and auto-labeling systems
Own data governance, quality, and security policies for self-improving AI agents, aligning with global standards
Build observability tools for agent behavior and decision tracking (lineage, reproducibility, versioning)
Mentor junior engineers and cultivate a high-performance engineering culture
Stay ahead of AI infrastructure trends and incorporate best practices into roadmaps
Act as subject matter expert for AI engineering internally and externally
Manage budgets for AI tools and measure value generated vs. costs
Drive ecosystem partnerships, vendor management, and executive-level influence to advance adoption
Success measures: division-wide AI adoption; delivery of scalable, enterprise-grade platforms; number of production AI agents driving measurable efficiency and effectiveness gains

Requirements

Graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (PhD a plus)
10+ years of data engineering experience
5+ years in leadership or architecture roles
Expertise in Python and SQL
Strong background in real-time streaming frameworks (Kafka, Pulsar, Spark Streaming, Flink)
Experience building and maintaining data lakes/warehouses (Snowflake, Delta Lake, BigQuery, MS Fabric)
Hands-on experience with LLMs, vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS), and agent memory systems
Knowledge of MLOps/agent lifecycle tooling (LangChain, MCP, AutoGen, MLflow)
Cloud-native architecture experience (AWS/GCP/Azure), including orchestration (Airflow, dbt)
Proven ability to influence, lead change, and communicate effectively with stakeholders
Willingness to travel up to 20%, including international travel
Flexibility to work remotely or from a HARMAN office hub
Bonus: Familiarity with agent frameworks (OpenAI Assistants, LangGraph, AutoGPT, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel)
Bonus: Data engineering certification (e.g., DP-600 for MS Fabric)
Bonus: Project Management certification (e.g., PMI)
Bonus: Automotive or manufacturing industry knowledge

Benefits

Flexible work environment, allowing for full-time remote work globally for positions that can be performed outside a HARMAN or customer location
Access to employee discounts on world-class products (JBL, HARMAN Kardon, AKG, and more)
Extensive training opportunities through HARMAN University
Competitive wellness benefits
Tuition reimbursement
“Be Brilliant” employee recognition and rewards program
An inclusive and diverse work environment that fosters and encourages professional and personal development