Senior Director Engineering, Applied AI - New York - A&E Networks

Description

Overview

Work Locations: A+E Global Media operates on a flexible model that allows for remote, hybrid or in office work (in certain locales), with some select roles having in-office requirements.

Office locations include New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Stamford, CT.

Our list of eligible states in which employees may work remotely includes: California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

About the Technology Team

A+E\'s Technology team is deep-rooted in the heart of our business. We have great people and great technologies, and together we take on the toughest challenges. As innovators, we choose to iterate, pivot, and adapt quickly. We\'ve reinvented the way A+E leverages technology to produce and sell world-class content. We\'ve modernized our core solutions and embraced a cloud first approach. Perched on the virtues of our \"Technology Code\", we make technology better, create solutions together, and most of all, we have fun with it. Our team members are motivated individuals who help each other do remarkable things every day. Together we deliver best-in-class solutions that transform the way A+E works. If this sounds like something you want to be a part of, we want to hear from you

The Role

Senior Director, Engineering - Applied AI — A+E Global Media is seeking a strategic and hands-on Senior Director, Engineering - Applied AI to lead the design, development, and delivery of AI-driven capabilities across our technology platforms. Reporting directly to the VP of Engineering, you will play a critical role in scaling our applied AI and generative AI initiatives while collaborating with product, data, and business teams to bring next-generation media experiences to life.

You will serve as a central technical leader, coordinating across multiple teams — including Data Engineering, Data Science, Product Management, Software Engineering, and Creative AI — to drive innovation, ensure delivery excellence, and align AI capabilities with business goals.

This is a unique opportunity to found and shape A+E Global Media\'s Applied AI engineering function from the ground up. You\'ll be the first dedicated Applied AI leader on the team, with the autonomy to define the vision, build a team of consultants, and lay the technical and cultural foundation for our Applied AI strategy moving forward.

MORE ABOUT WHAT YOU\'LL DO: Senior Director, Engineering - Applied AI

Key Responsibilities

• Applied AI Strategy & Execution: Drive the technical roadmap for applied AI across key product and business areas, including content intelligence, personalization, automation, and creative tooling.
• Partner with the VP of Engineering and peers to define how AI integrates into A+E Global Media\'s broader technology and product vision.
• Evaluate and implement cutting-edge AI techniques, including GenAI, LLMs, vision models, and recommendation systems.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and vendors to ensure the team remains at the forefront of innovation and leverages the best available tools for impact and scale.
• Drive development of custom AI solutions using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and model fine-tuning to meet business-specific needs across media, creative workflows, and internal business operations, including defining evals and benchmarks to ensure performance, grounding, and reliability.
• Design and lead systems that extract value from large, unstructured content sets - including PDFs, SharePoint documents, and multimedia assets (video, audio, image) - leveraging a combination of NLP, computer vision, multimodal models, LLMs, RAG, RLHF, and enterprise-scale retrieval techniques.
• Drive the thoughtful adoption of AI-powered tools within engineering to enhance developer productivity, model experimentation, and operational efficiency.

Team Leadership

• Build the Applied AI engineering function from scratch — defining the team\'s structure, hiring its first members, and establishing best practices and a strong technical culture from day one.
• Lead and mentor a growing team of engineers focused on applied AI systems, including full-stack AI, MLOps, and platform integrations.
• Cultivate a culture of experimentation, engineering rigor, and inclusive collaboration.
• Attract and retain top talent while supporting ongoing professional development.

Delivery & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Oversee the full lifecycle of applied AI systems, including model integration and orchestration - from prototyping and data exploration to deployment, monitoring, and retraining.
• Collaborate with Data Engineering and Data Science teams to ensure robust data pipelines and experimentation workflows.
• Partner with Product teams to co-develop AI-enabled features and prioritize high-impact initiatives.
• Work closely with other internal A+E Engineering teams to embed applied AI into production systems.
• Serve as a key technical counterpart to the Creative Generative AI teams, enabling media and video generation capabilities.

Operational Excellence

• Ensure engineering excellence across performance, scalability, monitoring, and AI system reliability and governance.
• Build and maintain scalable, cloud-based AI infrastructure.
• Champion responsible AI development aligned with privacy, IP, and ethical standards.

BASIC REQUIREMENTS: Senior Director, Engineering - Applied AI

• 12+ years of software engineering experience including team leadership experience
• Significant recent focus on application of AI technologies including experience applying LLM models or systems to real-world products and workflows.
• Proven track record of building and scaling engineering teams in a production AI environment.
• Experience working with Embeddings, RAG, RLFH, Fine Tuning etc at enterprise scale
• Experience with Python and/or Typescript/Javascript
• Experience designing or applying evals LLM models (LLMs), including prompt testing, grounding, hallucination detection, and performance benchmarking.
• Excellent communication skills and experience working on cross-functional initiatives.

Preferred

• Experience working with large-scale data in Adtech or Advertising-related platforms is a plus.
• Experience with Snowflake, Databricks, or similar systems is a plus.
• Experience with AI frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face) and deploying models to cloud environments is a plus
• Experience with data pipelines and integration patterns is a plus including MLOps
• Hands-on experience implementing RAG architectures at scale and/or fine-tuning large language models.
• Experience with diffusion/image/video models is a nice to have
• Exposure to creative pipelines or AI-enhanced content workflows is a plus
• Background in statistical modeling or mathematics is a plus.
• Familiarity with data privacy, copyright, and ethical issues in applied AI applications is helpful but not needed
• Experience in the media, entertainment, or content-tech industry is a plus.

Compensation

Annual Pay Range: $220,513 - $258,000. Annual Incentive Target: 20.00%.

The annual/hourly pay range displayed serves as a good faith estimate of the minimum and maximum base pay range for this role. Compensation for the role will be based on a number of different factors such as a candidate\'s qualifications, skills, competencies, location, and experience. A+E offers a competitive total compensation package, which includes healthcare coverage, 401k matching, and a range of other benefits. Learn more at

A+E Global Media proudly provides equal employment opportunity for all employees and job applicants, and makes employment decisions consistent with this principle. The company\'s employment actions and decisions - including recruitment, hiring, training, promotion, demotion, compensation, transfer, layoff, and termination - are made without regard to an employee\'s race, color, religion, creed, age, national origin, ancestry, sex (which includes pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and related medical conditions), gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, alienage or citizenship status, physical and/or mental disability, medical condition, family and medical leave status, genetic information, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. A+E Global Media is a joint venture of the Hearst Corporation and The Walt Disney Company. We are proud to be an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer/Disabled/Veterans.