Head of AI Platform Engineering Execution Plane

Head of AI Platform Engineering - Execution PlaneJob Details: Location: New York, NY (Hybrid/Onsite)Employment Type: Full-TimeCompensation: $180-$240k base plus bonus We are seeking a highly experienced Head of AI Platform Engineering to lead the design, development, and operation of our AI execution platform. This leader will own the execution plane that powers enterprise AI and agentic AI workloads, including model gateways, agent runtimes, orchestration frameworks, tool invocation services, MCP servers, retrieval pipelines, and production AI operations.This role combines deep technical leadership with people management and platform strategy. You will lead engineering teams responsible for building secure, scalable, and resilient AI infrastructure that enables enterprise-wide adoption of AI capabilities.What You'll Do * Lead and develop engineering teams responsible for AI execution and runtime platforms. * Define and execute the roadmap for AI execution services including model gateways, agent runtimes, orchestration frameworks, tool gateways, and inference services. * Build scalable, reliable, and observable runtime systems that support production AI workloads. * Partner with architecture, security, data engineering, application development, and platform teams to establish reusable AI platform capabilities. * Drive engineering excellence through architecture reviews, testing practices, CI/CD automation, incident management, operational readiness, and service reliability objectives. * Ensure execution platforms meet enterprise security, governance, compliance, and audit requirements. * Collaborate with stakeholders to identify opportunities for automation, AI adoption, and operational efficiency across the organization. * Establish best practices for deployment, monitoring, resiliency, and performance optimization of AI services.Required Qualifications * Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. * Proven experience leading software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, and developing senior technical talent. * Strong hands-on experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native platforms. * Experience leading teams responsible for AI/ML platforms, inference services, orchestration layers, runtime environments, or production AI operations. * Deep understanding of modern platform architecture, APIs, data access patterns, and enterprise integration strategies. * Experience building highly available and low-latency services with strong observability, resiliency, and operational controls. * Strong knowledge of CI/CD practices, infrastructure automation, testing frameworks, and production support models. * Understanding of enterprise security principles including identity management, auditability, secrets management, least-privilege access, and environment isolation. * Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence technical and business stakeholders.Preferred Qualifications * Experience with agentic AI systems, LLM platforms, model gateways, agent runtimes, and orchestration frameworks. * Hands-on experience with AWS services including Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, EKS, DynamoDB, S3, IAM, and CloudWatch. * Knowledge of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), vector databases, embeddings, enterprise search, and knowledge management architectures. * Experience with MLOps, LLMOps, model lifecycle management, AI evaluation frameworks, and inference optimization. * Expertise in designing multi-tenant platforms with RBAC, ABAC, workload isolation, and secure service-to-service communication. * Experience implementing observability solutions for AI workloads, including latency, cost attribution, tracing, safety metrics, and quality monitoring. * Background building reusable SDKs, platform abstractions, deployment templates, and runtime adapters. * Experienc