Director - Customer Development Lead, Automotive AI

Act as the technical authority for AI model onboarding, feature development, and optimization for automotive customers. Drive architectural and technical decisions that balance customer needs, platform constraints, scalability, and long‑term maintainability. Personally lead or review technically complex and high‑risk customer engagements and escalations. Provide technical leadership to a globally distributed team composed of AI engineers Influence staffing, skill development, and pod composition to match evolving technical and customer demands.

Mentor senior and mid‑level engineers, raising the overall technical bar of the organization. Serve as a champion for developer experience across all customer engineering outputs. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 8+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience. OR Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 7+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience.

OR PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 6+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience. Deep, hands‑on experience in AI/ML model onboarding, optimization, and deployment, preferably in Automotive, Embedded, Mobile, or AI Systems. Proven Principal‑level technical leadership in complex HW/SW systems. Strong background in ML inference pipelines, quantization methods, performance/accuracy trade‑offs, and hardware accelerators.

Demonstrated ability to lead cross‑functional efforts without direct authority. Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience influencing senior technical and executive stakeholders. Automotive AI experience across ADAS, VLM, LLM, perception, and multimodal systems. Track record of delivering customer‑facing PoCs and reference implementations. Experience defining developer workflows, tooling, and documentation standards or experience leading globally distributed engineering teams. Familiarity with automotive compliance and restricted‑code environments.

Ensure predictable, high‑quality outcomes across multiple concurrent customer programs. Drive coordination across AI tools and platform teams, working closely with Product Management. Ensure fixes and enhancements are mainlined, validated, and customer‑ready. Partner with frontline Customer Engineering (CE) teams, which own final delivery to customers, to ensure seamless handoff and enablement.