Director of AI Engineering

Overview

Thrivent is seeking an experienced Director of AI Engineering to provide strategic and technical leadership for building scalable, secure, and compliant production AI platforms and products. This role sets the vision and direction for multiple teams delivering agentic AI, LLM/RAG, and classical ML capabilities across AWS and Azure, ensuring measurable business outcomes, operational excellence, and strong engineering culture. This leader operates through engineering managers and senior technologists, balancing hands-on technical credibility with enterprise-scale strategy, governance, and stakeholder partnership.

Success looks like resilient AI platforms, trusted and compliant AI solutions, empowered teams, and clear alignment between technology investment and business value.

Designing Solutions

• Sets the vision for AI engineering teams and empowers teams to design scalable, secure, and compliant solutions.
• Reviews overall and high‑level designs, providing feedback and guidance to engineering leaders and teams.
• Helps teams understand architecture strategy for assigned product groups and how solutions align with the broader enterprise architecture and AI platform direction.

Developing Software

• Demonstrates strong critical thinking and technical judgment related to software development, architecture, and platform design.

Learning and Applying New Techniques

• Influences teams to adopt modern engineering and AI techniques; shares technical insights and best practices across product groups.
• Continuously seeks innovative techniques and solutions to address complex business problems and strategic initiatives.

Collaborating Within Team

• Promotes collaboration, engagement, and accountability across teams.
• Provides opportunities to recognize, celebrate, and reinforce team and individual successes.

Collaborating Across Teams

• Regularly engages in product group sprint demos to understand delivered capabilities and achieved outcomes; provides constructive feedback to support continuous improvement.
• Encourages engagement across product groups to share learnings, reuse solutions, and leverage best practices.
• Understands the organization’s broader technology ecosystem and how product groups contribute to enterprise outcomes.
• Breaks down product group barriers that impede delivery, alignment, and continuous improvement.

Collaborating Across the Organization

• Builds strong relationships across the organization and across business and technology disciplines.
• Brings teams together to solve the organization’s most strategic and complex problems and deliver new capabilities collaboratively.
• Creates shared understanding and alignment on goals and strategies for both the enterprise and the technology organization.
• Provides senior leadership visibility into accomplishments, risks, and progress of teams.
• Supports organizational rollout of new Dev Ops, MLOps, and platform capabilities and version updates across teams.

Setting Product / Platform Technology Strategy

• Builds and establishes software engineering foundations, practices and cadences
• Partners with product management to set AI platform and product technology vision and desired outcomes.
• Provides mentorship and motivation to engineering leaders and teams to select and execute technology strategies that support organizational growth and long‑term sustainability.

Defining Engineering Standards / Patterns

• Promotes engineering standards, patterns, and continuous improvement practices, including Dev Ops, observability, and platform reliability.

Dev Ops

• Supports development lifecycle processes and operational model guidelines across product groups.
• Ensures operational health is clearly defined, measured, and continuously improved.
• Creates and promotes cross‑learning opportunities for engineers to adopt new Dev Ops and operational practices.

Selecting & Managing Technology Vendors

• Acts as an advocate to define criteria for selecting appropriate platforms and technologies.
• Owns overall technology solutions and platforms for product groups, including vendor relationships.
• Provides direction and feedback to ensure selection of vendors aligns with architectural strategy,…