Director, AI Engineering (Data Science)

Responsibilities

• Define technical investments and AI roadmap aligned with business objectives
• Mentor and manage AI/ML engineers, senior data scientists, and MLOps engineers
• Lead the design and development of custom transformer models for sequence modeling and propensity scoring
• Oversee end-to-end data science workflows from problem framing to production deployment
• Lead technical discovery and solutioning with enterprise clients
• Present AI strategy and model results to C-suite and senior stakeholders
• Establish production standards for model deployment, monitoring, and drift detection using cloud platforms
• Drive adoption of MLOps best practices including CI/CD and containerization

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field (Ph.D. preferred)
• 10+ years of experience in data science and machine learning
• 3–5 years in a people management or technical leadership role
• Deep expertise in designing and training custom transformer architectures
• Proficiency in Python and ML/DL libraries such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or HuggingFace
• Experience with SQL and large-scale data platforms like Spark, BigQuery, Snowflake, or Databricks
• Proven track record in MLOps and cloud deployment (AWS SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI, or Azure ML)
• Exceptional executive communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Professional services experience across multiple client engagements
• Background in privacy-preserving ML (federated learning, differential privacy)
• Knowledge of graph neural networks (GNNs)
• Published research in applied transformers or tabular deep learning
• Experience with real-time inference and streaming ML pipelines (Kafka, Flink)
• Deep experience with OpenAI focused on embeddings

About the Company

Blend is a premier AI services provider, committed to co-creating meaningful impact for its clients through the power of data science, AI, technology, and people.