Senior Director, AI Platform Operations

When you're the best, we're the best. We instill an environment where employees feel engaged, satisfied and able to contribute their unique skills and talents while living and working as their authentic selves. We provide extensive opportunities for personal and professional development, building both employee competence and organizational capability to fuel exceptional performance through an inclusive environment both now and in the future.

Summary

In this role you will lead the strategic development and operation of Vizient's enterprise AI infrastructure. This role is pivotal in delivering a scalable, secure, and highly available ML platform that powers advanced analytics, generative AI, and machine learning use cases across the organization. The Senior Director will own the full lifecycle of the AI platform from system architecture and DevOps to operational excellence, governance, and compliance. The position will lead a multidisciplinary team comprising engineering managers, MLOps engineers, reliability engineers, and cloud infrastructure specialists, while also working closely with stakeholders from Data Science, Security, and Business Technology.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the AI platform strategy aligned with enterprise AI/ML initiatives and business objectives.
• Drive the development of a highly automated, self-service ML platform supporting both batch and real-time use cases.
• Oversee the design and implementation of reusable components for data ingestion, feature engineering, model training, deployment, and observability.
• Build and manage high-performing, cross-functional teams focused on MLOps, platform engineering, and platform reliability.
• Establish OKRs, performance metrics, and team roadmaps that promote accountability and excellence.
• Mentor senior engineering staff and create a culture of technical curiosity, operational rigor, and continuous improvement.
• Serve as a key liaison to the data science, enterprise data, cloud security, legal, and compliance teams to ensure platform capabilities align with governance and regulatory requirements.
• Provide strategic input to AI Steering Committees, Architecture Review Boards, and executive sponsors.
• Lead cross-functional planning with product and business teams to identify new AI capabilities, cost-saving opportunities, and innovation potential.
• Ensure platform SLAs, SLOs, and support policies are in place and regularly reviewed.
• Implement scalable CI/CD, testing, rollback, and monitoring strategies for AI models and workflows.
• Own cost governance, cloud optimization, and resource scheduling across AI workloads (e.g., GPU/TPU allocation, inference endpoints).

Qualifications:

• Relevant degree preferred. Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related field. MBA, MPH or MHA preferred.
• 10+ years of experience in enterprise application development, with at least 5+ years in leadership roles.
• Proven track record building or scaling enterprise AI/ML infrastructure and operations in cloud environments (Azure, AWS, or GCP).
• Deep understanding of enterprise architecture principles, data security standards, and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Exceptional communication, budgeting, and vendor management skills.
• Familiarity with AI governance frameworks, model risk management (MRM), and ethical AI practices.
• Exposure to large-scale distributed training, foundation models, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures.

#IDS

#LI-JB1

Estimated Hiring Range:

This position is also incentive eligible.

Vizient has a comprehensive benefits plan! Please view our benefits here:

http://www.vizientinc.com/about-us/careers

Equal Opportunity Employer: Females/Minorities/Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities

The Company is committed to equal employment opportunity to all employees and applicants without regard to race, religion, color, gender identity, ethnicity, age, national origin, sexual orientation, disability status, veteran status or any other category protected by applicable law.