Assistant Vice President, AI Engineering

Southern New Hampshire University is a team of innovators dedicated to transforming lives through education. They are seeking an Assistant Vice President of AI Engineering to oversee operational execution and technical quality in AI projects, ensuring they move from strategy to production systems effectively.

Responsibilities:

• You will lead operational delivery across AI Engineering: planning, staffing, execution, and shipment of projects
• You will translate strategy into executable technical plans, milestones, and resourcing models
• You will maintain visibility into project status, risks, dependencies, and delivery health
• You will guide execution practices across teams (planning cadences, estimation, delivery reviews, retrospectives, postmortems)
• You will ensure production readiness, on-call practices, and incident response processes are in place and improving
• You will lead long-term sustainability of AI systems post-launch, including maintenance, monitoring, and ongoing optimization
• You will be senior technical authority for AI Engineering and infrastructure decisions
• You will guide architecture for agentic AI systems, data platforms, evaluation frameworks, and production services - with a focus on scalability, reliability, security, cost efficiency, and observability
• You will establish organizational standards for agent orchestration, memory, and tool use patterns
• You will lead cost governance for LLM-based systems (token economics, model selection tradeoffs)
• You will define evaluation strategy for LLM and agent-based systems, ensuring measurable performance criteria exist before production deployment
• You will partner with Staff and Principal Engineers across SNHU to establish and promote adherence to AI technical standards
• You will directly manage engineering and senior technical leads
• You will coach managers on delivery, performance, and team development
• You will lead staffing, hiring, onboarding and career growth
• You will foster a culture of accountability, psychological safety, and continuous improvement
• You will partner across SNHU teams, including AI Governance, Product, Data Science, Design, IT, and Academic partners to ensure smooth execution
• You will communicate delivery progress, tradeoffs, and constraints to senior leadership
• You will help translate technical realities into applicable decisions for senior leadership
• You will set expectations and create conditions for AI-augmented development across the organization: tooling decisions, workflow patterns, and evolving standards for how the team uses AI development tools

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with time in production systems
• 5+ years leading engineering teams through managers or senior technical leads
• Experience overseeing delivery for complex, multi-team technical projects
• Expertise balancing technical depth with people and operational leadership
• Experience in production software systems engineering
• Experience building and operating AI-enabled systems in production environments
• Experience with agentic AI architecture, LLM-based systems, and agent orchestration patterns
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or equivalent), data pipelines, and system reliability
• Experience with evaluation methodologies for LLMs and agentic systems (offline evals, human-in-the-loop, production monitoring)
• Experience with AI development tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar)
• Experience with complex architecture reviews, technical tradeoffs, and debugging when needed
• Experience establishing engineering processes that improve predictability without bureaucracy
• Familiarity with on-call models, incident response, and production operations
• Experience improving engineering quality, delivery speed, and system stability