Engineering Director - AI/ML

Heroku is seeking an engineering leader to drive exciting new AI, machine learning, and LLM offerings for our customers. Delivering on the promise of AI involves a lot of data, security, and privacy concerns, and you must be able to simplify these complexities and deliver delightful AI capabilities in Heroku’s opinionated and powerful developer experience. You will focus on a range of AI opportunities: from hosting our customers’ AI workloads within a fully managed service, to delivering Heroku assistants for operators and developers, and using AI to improve the efficiency of Heroku’s internal platform.

This is a technology management role involving knowledge of programming, architecture patterns, machine learning fundamentals, AI frameworks, compliance, costs, and the latest technologies associated with delivering managed AI services to developers. This role will partner with Heroku AI product manager and architect to define and deliver AI offerings.

Heroku is looking for technically strong, driven, energetic, compassionate, and passionate leaders to lead our software engineering teams. You will run and lead a team/teams of outstanding developers and keep quality in mind. We work in a collaborative environment, and we value open communication and feedback, code reviews, and making learning fun!

Heroku is taking a big step forward this year with a significant investment in hiring, roadmap and new technologies. You can help shape this exciting future! Read more at https://blog.heroku.com/

Responsibilities

• Increase Heroku’s AI competency across all engineering teams using a mix of mentoring, training, and hiring industry experts
• Drive the execution and delivery of AI and machine learning features by collaborating with many multi-functional teams, architects, product owners and engineers
• Make critical decisions that attribute to the success of the product
• Proactive in foreseeing issues and resolving it before it happens
• Daily management of stand-ups as the Scrum Master for AI/ML engineering teams
• Partner with research and user experience teams to align on customer needs, personas, and desired product experience
• Partner with product owners and architects to align with objectives, priorities, tradeoffs, and risk
• Ensure teams have clear priorities and adequate resources
• Empower the delivery team to self coordinate
• Be a multiplier and have a passion for team and team members’ success
• Provide technical guidance, career development, and mentoring to team members
• Maintain high morale and motivate the delivery team to go above and beyond
• Vocally advocate for technical excellence and helping the teams make good decisions
• Participate in architecture discussions and planning
• Participate in multi-functional coordination, planning, and reviews with leads from other engineering teams
• Maintain and nurture our team culture by interviewing and hiring only the most qualified individuals
• Occasionally chipping in to development tasks such as coding and feature verifications to assist teams with release commitments, to gain an understanding of the deeply technical product as well as to keep your technical skill sharp

Qualifications

• BS or MS in Engineering, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or related disciplines or equivalent experience in technical leadership roles
• Prior experience in engineering leadership in shipping features with AI and ML capabilities on AWS infrastructure
• 6+ years of proven track record leading software engineering teams with a distinguished track record on AI/ML projects and technically fast-paced projects
• Minimum of 5+ years of proven track record leading software engineering teams, with proven expertise in AI, including generative AI, machine learning, and enterprise / PaaS environments. Experience in multiple AI technologies, services and products, as well as legal and privacy requirements faced by organizations wanting to build AI experiences.
• Experience building, delivering, and operating AI capabilities in AWS infrastructure
• Experience leading large-scale distributed systems, working with microservices and/or distributed architecture
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, organizational and time management skills
• Ability to be flexible, proactive, comfortable working with minimal specifications
• Experience with short release cycles, the full software lifecycle, and experience working on a product that’s been released for public consumption
• Experience in hiring, mentoring and leading engineers
• Working experience of software engineering best practices including coding standards, code reviews, SCM, CI, build processes, testing, and operations
• Experience with Agile development methodologies. Scrum Master experience required
• Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and product management to understand requirements, describe software product features, and technical designs
• Ability to work with architects, principal architects, and CTO to craft the architectural vision and roadmap for the organization

Preferred Skills

• Familiarity with Heroku and Salesforce platforms