Director of AI Engineering

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.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• Demonstrates strong critical thinking and technical judgment related to software development, architecture, and platform design
• 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
• Promotes collaboration, engagement, and accountability across teams
• Provides opportunities to recognize, celebrate, and reinforce team and individual successes
• 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
• 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 DevOps, MLOps, and platform capabilities and version updates across teams
• 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
• Promotes engineering standards, patterns, and continuous improvement practices, including DevOps, observability, and platform reliability
• 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 DevOps and operational practices
• 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, security, and long‑term objectives
• Holds regular 1:1s with direct reports and conducts periodic skip‑level and team meetings
• Provides opportunities and frameworks for leadership and career growth
• Gives constructive feedback and coaching to help engineering managers grow their skills, experience, and impact
• Plans in advance for future talent needs across product groups and collaborates with other leaders on recruitment strategies
• Drives the hiring process for engineering managers and engineers and participates in recruiting for the product area
• Engages in the technology community to strengthen the Thrivent technology brand and position Thrivent as an employer of choice
• Recruits, develops, and sustains high‑performing teams while promoting a culture of shared accountability, operational excellence, and partnership across the organization
• Models Thrivent’s leadership competencies — courage, collaboration, and commitment — by demonstrating resiliency, making thoughtful decisions, and holding self and others accountable
• Supports and fosters an environment focused on continuous improvement, exceptional employee engagement, and unwavering commitment to clients
• Shapes a culture aligned to Thrivent’s purpose, promise, and values, ensuring trust and reputation remain strong
• Manages a team of direct and indirect staff

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or other technical field or equivalent work experience
• 10+ years of progressively responsible positions in Information Technology including a 5+ years' management/supervisory experience in specific IT functional area discipline
• Strong leader with a demonstrated track record recruiting and developing teams in current- and next-generation platforms and systems' needs
• Demonstrated experience in creating, leading, and implementing large scale strategic projects
• Strong communication skills and excellence in negotiation with business partners
• Strong relationship building and interpersonal skills
• Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with executive leadership, lines of business stakeholders, and technology staff across the organization
• Background in information delivery including BI/analytic reporting, operational reporting, KPIs, using reporting services
• Experience in development of business strategies, Center of Expense strategies and delivery of enterprise data services
• MBA
• Financial Services industry experience
• Experience in IT planning and business relationship management
• Experience working in a matrix management organization
• Experience with product development and management