Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. WAI Global is a global aftermarket leader headquartered in South Florida, focused on enhancing operations through AI and digital capabilities. The Director, AI Platform and Development Engineering is responsible for building and governing the AI-ready data foundation and platform capabilities to support WAI's AI automation strategy.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design, build, deployment, and continuous improvement of WAI's AI-ready data and platform foundation across sales, inventory, planning, catalog, customer, order, product, and related business systems
- Design, build, and govern a centralized data lake that consolidates critical data from ERP and other core business systems into a single trusted foundation, enabling AI tools, models, and analytics to reliably access enterprise data
- Identify repetitive and manual tasks, use process mining to uncover workflow bottlenecks, and implement RPA solutions to improve efficiency and streamline operations
- Own technical architecture for AI/ML/LLM workflows, RAG, embeddings, vector search, structured data query, dashboards, APIs, model serving, and monitoring
- Connect, ingest, clean, validate, normalize, and automate data pipelines from structured and unstructured sources, including enterprise systems, reports, documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, and business notes
- Build or oversee a trusted unified data layer with schema standards, data-quality monitoring, lineage, source traceability, and failure detection
- Develop and support machine learning and statistical methods for revenue trends, sales forecasting, anomaly detection, stock monitoring, shortage/overstock prediction, demand forecasting, variance analysis, and risk identification
- Build grounded LLM workflows that connect to trusted WAI data, generate AI summaries, support natural-language business questions, reduce hallucinations, and return business-friendly explanations with source references
- Implement embeddings and vector search capabilities using pgvector or other approved vector database technologies, tuned for retrieval precision, speed, broad scanning, and deep analysis
- Build or support dashboards, KPIs, forecasts, anomaly alerts, AI summaries, drill-down to source data, automatic refresh, and exportable leadership or business reports
- Deploy reliable pipelines, models, APIs, dashboards, and LLM workflows while optimizing inference cost, latency, GPU memory, throughput, model selection, and production performance
- Implement role-based access control, auditability, data governance, source traceability, monitoring, evaluation, and verifiable AI outputs in partnership with IT/security stakeholders
- Provide technical direction to offshore AI engineers, data/integration engineers, vendors, and implementation partners
- Partner with the AI Automation Director and business-facing teams to ensure platform work is aligned to approved use cases, business value, adoption needs, and governance priorities
- Evaluate hosted AI services, open-source models, AI/ML frameworks, orchestration tools, and proof-of-concepts; recommend when to use hosted models versus self-hosted or WAI-tuned models
Skills
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field required
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, AI/ML engineering, enterprise architecture, analytics engineering, cloud engineering, or related technical roles
- Experience designing or leading production data platforms, data lakes or lakehouses, analytics platforms, AI/ML platforms, LLM/RAG solutions, model workflows, APIs, or enterprise integration architectures
- Hands-on experience with data pipelines, SQL, Python, APIs, cloud platforms, data modeling, orchestration, monitoring, and production support practices
- Hands-on experience with LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, prompt/evaluation workflows, AI agents, model serving, and AI orchestration frameworks required
- Experience directly managing or providing technical direction to offshore/remote engineering teams required
- Technical leadership with the ability to translate business strategy into scalable, secure, and maintainable platform architecture
- Sound judgment regarding data quality, security, privacy, model reliability, human review, monitoring, and production readiness
- Ability to balance speed of delivery with enterprise standards, governance, cost, and long-term maintainability
- Strong partnership skills with IT, business leaders, data owners, automation teams, security stakeholders, and offshore delivery resources
- Analytical thinking and structured problem-solving across data, systems, model, and workflow domains
- Ownership mindset, attention to detail, curiosity, and continuous learning in a fast-changing AI environment
- Ability to evaluate emerging technologies pragmatically and select tools based on business value, risk, cost, and scalability
- Advanced knowledge of Python, SQL, APIs, JSON, data pipelines, ETL/ELT, orchestration, data lake/lakehouse architecture, data modeling, and cloud deployment practices
- English fluency required; additional languages are a plus based on business needs
- Master's degree preferred; equivalent senior technical experience may be considered
- Experience with ERP, CRM, catalog, inventory, planning, customer, order, or product data in an operationally complex business preferred
- Experience directing contractors, vendors, or implementation partners also preferred
- Experience with model serving, GPUs, containerization, MLOps, observability, or cost optimization preferred
- Familiarity with LangChain, LangGraph, OpenAI APIs, Azure AI, Microsoft Copilot, open-source models such as Llama, Mistral, Qwen, or similar tools preferred
- Certifications in cloud platforms, data engineering, AI/ML, cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, Microsoft Azure AI, MLOps, or related technical areas are preferred
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