Director - Engineering

Wood Mackenzie is the global data and analytics business for the renewables, energy, and natural resources industries. Enhanced by technology. Enriched by human intelligence. In an ever-changing world, companies and governments need reliable and actionable insight to lead the transition to a sustainable future. That’s why we cover the entire supply chain with unparalleled breadth and depth, backed by over 50 years’ experience. Our team of over 2,400 experts, operating across 30 global locations, are enabling customers’ decisions through real-time analytics, consultancy, events and thought leadership. Together, we deliver the insight they need to separate risk from opportunity and make confident decisions when it matters most.

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Wood Mackenzie Values

• Inclusive – we succeed together
• Trusting – we choose to trust each other
• Customer committed – we put customers at the heart of our decisions
• Future Focused – we accelerate change
• Curious – we turn knowledge into action

Position Overview

We're looking for a visionary and execution-focused Director of Engineering, AI to spearhead our enterprise-wide Artificial Intelligence initiatives, particularly the ground-up development of our core agentic framework. This is a key leadership position in building scalable, modern, and AI-enriched platforms, driving innovation through applied machine learning, generative AI (GenAI), and intelligent automation that will redefine our product landscape.

You'll be responsible for the end-to-end architecture, engineering, and operations of our cutting-edge AI platforms, with a laser focus on modern cloud-native practices, robust CI/CD automation, and real-world Large Language Model (LLM) deployments. This isn't just a leadership role; it's a deeply hands-on position where your expertise will directly shape our foundational AI capabilities.

Key Responsibilities:

Leadership & Strategy

• Define and drive the strategic roadmap for our AI initiatives, ensuring tight alignment with core business priorities and our evolving product vision.
• Lead a high-performing team of AI and data engineers across geographically distributed teams (US, UK, and India), fostering a culture of rapid innovation, accountability, and delivery excellence.
• Develop comprehensive staffing and resourcing plans, actively helping the team grow and evolve.
• Champion a product-centric and platform-driven mindset across our AI and data domains, always bringing innovative ideas to the table, including the very latest technology trends to solve complex, real-world problems.

AI Architecture & Agentic Framework Development

• Architect and deliver our agentic framework from the ground up, leveraging your deep knowledge of AI frameworks and workflows.
• Design and evolve enterprise AI architecture, including scalable cloud-native data lakes, Snowflake-based data warehouses, and real-time streaming infrastructure, all designed to power advanced AI applications.
• Lead the development and implementation of LLM-powered applications and intelligent agents, including advanced search, generative agents, and conversational AI.
• Utilize and implement specialized AI techniques, including but not limited to:
  • Embedding and Vectorization strategies for efficient data representation.
  • Advanced RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) and ReACT RAG patterns for enhanced model performance and factual grounding.
  • Model Context Protocol for managing complex conversational states.
  • A2A (Agent-to-Agent) frameworks for sophisticated multi-agent orchestration.
  • Techniques for grounding and synthesizing data to improve AI reliability.
  • Developing and integrating Snowflake connectors and other similar data integration techniques crucial for AI data pipelines.
• Establish and enforce best practices for CI/CD, IaC (Infrastructure as Code), and automated testing for all AI and data pipelines, ensuring rapid and reliable deployment.
• Maintain a deeply hands-on approach with our core technology stack: Node.js, Python, and Java, applying various key architecture principles to build robust and scalable systems.

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Lead the operationalization of our AI platforms on AWS, including the effective use of services like S3, Lambda, Step Functions, SageMaker, Bedrock, and AppFlow.
• Optimize AI workloads for peak performance, cost efficiency, and scalability, with considerations for multi-region deployment.

AI Platform Management & Responsible AI

• Oversee data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration, utilizing tools like Apache Airflow, dbt, Glue, and Kafka/Kinesis to feed our AI systems.
• Drive responsible AI practices, model governance, and ensure auditability of all AI solutions.
• Build secure, scalable AI agentic frameworks for complex task automation, human-in-the-loop decision-making, and orchestration of multi-agent systems.

Collaboration & Delivery

• Act as a critical bridge between business stakeholders, data science, and engineering teams, ensuring alignment and enabling rapid prototyping of AI solutions.
• Deliver high-quality, production-grade AI capabilities within deadlines and with measurable business impact.
• Cultivate a strong working relationship with our Product and UX teams, ensuring seamless integration and user-centric AI solutions.
• Present architectural decisions and progress to executive leadership with exceptional clarity and influence.
• Possess strong communication and presentation skills, articulating complex AI concepts effectively to diverse audiences.

Agile & Innovation

• Implement agile methodologies to ensure iterative development and continuous improvement within the AI development lifecycle.
• Utilize feature flags to enable experimentation and rapid deployment of new AI features and models.
• Foster a culture of experimentation and innovation, encouraging teams to test hypotheses and learn from failures in the AI space.
• Ensure that feature flags are used responsibly to manage risk and maintain system stability for AI deployments.
• Willingness to travel as needed to collaborate with our globally distributed teams.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years in technology leadership roles, with 5+ years in a Director of Architecture or Engineering, or higher capacity, specifically within the AI or advanced data domains.
• Proven experience managing large-scale cloud data platforms and modern AI architectures.
• Deep expertise in AWS cloud architecture and cloud-native services.
• Extensive hands-on experience with Node.js, Python, and Java in a production environment.
• Advanced knowledge and hands-on experience with LLMs, GenAI frameworks, and AI orchestration platforms, including RAG, ReACT RAG, Model Context Protocol, A2A frameworks, embedding, vectorization, grounding, and synthesizing data.
• Solid foundation in enterprise architecture, platform engineering, and data governance for AI systems.
• Strong understanding of ML Ops, model lifecycle management, and real-time AI integration.
• Demonstrated experience with CI/CD pipelines and API-first design principles.
• Exceptional communication skills, executive presence, and a clear sense of urgency to execute AI initiatives at scale.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience with advanced agentic AI frameworks and multi-agent orchestration.
• Familiarity with compliance standards, AI ethics, and data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, SOC2) as they pertain to AI systems.
• Experience with Snowflake connectors or similar enterprise data integration tools for AI workloads.

What Success Looks Like

• A unified, high-performance AI and data platform enabling self-service analytics and rapid innovation for the business.
• Delivered real-time, AI-driven features deeply embedded in key business applications, significantly impacting user experience and operational efficiency.
• A world-class AI engineering team, executing at speed with exceptional quality and fostering continuous growth.
• Tangible cost efficiencies, enhanced data usability, and a clear, measurable ROI from our AI investments.

Equal Opportunities

We are an equal opportunities employer. This means we are committed to recruiting the best people regardless of their race, colour, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability or protected veteran status. You can find out more about your rights under the law at www.eeoc.gov 

If you are applying for a role and have a physical or mental disability, we will support you with your application or through the hiring process.