Director - AI & Software Engineering

Straive is seeking a hands-on technology leader to serve as the senior technical authority for our AI, analytics, and software engineering solutions.

About the Role:

You will set technical direction, resolve complex engineering challenges, and move solutions from prototype to secure, scalable production.

The role combines architecture and execution leadership including a mandate to improve enterprise AI economics through fit-for-purpose frontier, open-source, and smaller models.

This is not a conventional delivery-governance role.

You will remain close to the technology, lead critical design and code reviews, mentor teams, and take accountability for high-stakes technical outcomes.

Key Responsibilities:

Production-Grade Engineering:

- Own engineering standards across architecture, development, testing, deployment, security, observability, and documentation.

- Ensure prototypes have a credible production path; introduce architecture and code reviews, automated testing, quality gates, and release-readiness checks.

- Close gaps in scalability, performance, reliability, maintainability, and security from design through deployment.

AI Architecture and Economics:

- Define scalable, reliable, and cost-effective AI/GenAI architectures based on accuracy, cost, latency, privacy, and deployment needs.

- Lead selection, evaluation, fine-tuning, optimization, and deployment of frontier, open-source, small, and domain-specific models.

- Reduce operating cost through model routing, caching, quantization, batching, retrieval and prompt optimization; design robust RAG and agentic systems with evaluation, guardrails, monitoring, and human oversight.

Technical Architecture and Platforms:

- Serve as the final escalation point for complex architecture, performance, security, and deployment issues.

- Guide modular applications, APIs, microservices, data pipelines, AI services, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations.

- Promote reusable components and strong cloud-native, CI/CD, observability, data governance, and secure-development practices.

Team Capability:

- Mentor architects, engineering leads, data scientists, and developers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical workshops.

- Build independent problem-solving capability, identify skill gaps, and support targeted hiring and development.

- Create a culture of engineering ownership, technical rigor, experimentation, and continuous improvement.

Client Solutioning and Innovation:

- Partner with commercial, consulting, and delivery teams on client workshops, proposals, due diligence, and solution design.

- Assess feasibility, architecture, effort, risk, and operating cost; translate business problems into pragmatic technical roadmaps.

- Develop reference architectures and accelerators that strengthen Straive's differentiation and delivery speed.

Required Experience and Qualifications:

- 12 - 18 years across software engineering, architecture, data platforms, AI/ML, or related roles, including experience in a startup, product company, or similarly fast-moving environment.

- Proven ownership of enterprise-grade software, data, or AI products from architecture through production adoption.

- Strong hands-on engineering background, preferably in Python and modern backend/frontend technologies.

- Practical GenAI experience spanning RAG, vector search, agentic workflows, model evaluation, safety controls, and production monitoring.

- Strong command of distributed systems, APIs, microservices, cloud-native architecture, enterprise integration, and at least one major cloud platform.

- Working knowledge of containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, observability, secure development, and modern data platforms.

- Demonstrated ability to improve solution cost, latency, scalability, reliability, and engineering quality.

- Experience mentoring senior technical professionals and communicating complex decisions to business and client leaders.

Preferred Experience:

- Multi-tenant platforms, reusable AI accelerators, MLOps/LLMOps, model governance, or regulated and security-sensitive environments.

- Technical pre-sales, client workshops, proposals, solution estimation, and technical due diligence.

- A track record of taking multiple AI or software products from concept to sustained production use.

Leadership Profile:

- Hands-on and accountable: Stays close to code and architecture and drives critical issues to resolution.

- Commercially pragmatic: Balances technical ambition with client value, speed, maintainability, and cost.

- Constructive challenger: Identifies weaknesses early, challenges assumptions, and raises engineering standards.

- Capability builder: Develops strong, independent teams rather than becoming the sole source of expertise.

Why Join Straive?:

You will shape how enterprise-grade AI solutions are architected, built, and scaled with the mandate to influence technical strategy, strengthen engineering practices, develop high-performing teams, and deliver differentiated solutions for global clients.