Director, AI Engineering (Tip.AI)

Job Description

Position Overview
The Director, Platform Engineering - TIP.AI Platform is a senior technical role responsible for designing, building, and operating the highly scalable, resilient platform infrastructure that powers AI systems across the enterprise. This role functions as a principal engineer, building and architecting technical solutions, establishing platform standards, and solving the most complex scalability, reliability, and performance challenges, while also providing technical leadership and mentorship across multiple engineering teams.

The ideal candidate is deeply hands-on, systems-oriented, and experienced operating large-scale, cloud-native platforms that support mission-critical AI, data, and automation workloads. This leader thrives at the intersection of architecture, reliability, developer productivity, and operational excellence.
Key Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the core platform architecture for TIP.AI, ensuring it is scalable, highly available, secure, and cost-efficient at enterprise scale.
• Establish and maintain reference architectures, design patterns, and engineering standards for platform services.
• Own platform reliability, including availability, performance, resiliency, and disaster recovery.
• Define and enforce SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for core platform services.
• Build and mature observability practices (metrics, logs, traces) to ensure deep operational insight.
• Partner with security teams to ensure platform designs meet enterprise security, privacy, and compliance requirements.
• Build internal platform capabilities and shared services that improve developer velocity and consistency.
• Establish CI/CD, deployment, and runtime patterns that enable safe, fast delivery at scale.
• Reduce cognitive load on application teams by abstracting infrastructure complexity behind well-designed platform interfaces.
• Act as the principal technical authority for the TIP.AI Platform team.
• Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, raising the technical bar across the organization.
• Influence without direct authority, partnering closely with product, data, AI, and security leaders.
• Partner with product, AI, and business leaders to align platform capabilities with TIP.AI's long-term roadmap.
• Translate business and growth goals into scalable technical strategies.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production environments.
• Deep experience designing, building and operating large-scale, distributed, systems
• Strong background in fault tolerant, auto-recoverable software systems at scale.
• Proven expertise in reliability engineering, scalability, and performance optimization.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform).
• Strong proficiency in infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD systems.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, mentor senior engineers, and set technical direction across teams.
• Full-Stack Entrepreneurial Mindset: Must have bootstrapped/built at least one full stack system delivered to real users.
• Excellent verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex architectural decisions clearly.
• Ability to produce/review extremely clean software documentation
• Ability to effectively communicate async with remote team members across the globe.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting AI/ML, data platforms, or high-scale automation systems.
• Background in platform teams serving multiple internal product or engineering groups.
• Familiarity with security, privacy, and compliance requirements in large enterprises.
• Experience driving cost governance and efficiency for large-scale cloud platforms.
• Prior work in highly regulated or global enterprise environments.

Why This Role Matters
TIP.AI's success depends on a platform that is rock-solid, scalable, and invisible to its users. This role ensures the foundation is strong enough to support rapid innovation while remaining secure, reliable, and cost-effective at scale. It is a rare opportunity to operate as a true principal engineer while shaping the long-term technical future of a flagship enterprise platform.

At Marriott International, we are dedicated to being an equal opportunity employer, welcoming all and providing access to opportunity. We actively foster an environment where the unique backgrounds of our associates are valued and celebrated. Our greatest strength lies in the rich blend of culture, talent, and experiences of our associates. We are committed to non-discrimination on any protected basis, including disability, veteran status, or other basis protected by applicable law.

About Us

All positions offer a 401(k) plan, stock purchase plan, discounts at Marriott properties, commuter benefits, employee assistance plan, and childcare discounts. Benefits are subject to terms and conditions, which may include rules regarding eligibility, enrollment, waiting period, contribution, benefit limits, election changes, benefit exclusions, and others. Click here to learn more.

Full-time positions also offer coverage for medical, dental, vision, health care flexible spending account, dependent care flexible spending account, life insurance, disability insurance, accident insurance, adoption expense reimbursements, paid parental leave and educational assistance.

Washington Applicants Only: Employees will accrue paid sick leave, 0.077 PTO balance for every hour worked and be eligible to receive a minimum of 9 holidays annually.

Marriott HQ is committed to a hybrid work environment that enables associates to Be connected. Headquarters-based positions are considered hybrid, for candidates within a commuting distance to Bethesda, MD; candidates outside of commuting distance to Bethesda, MD will be considered for Remote positions.

About the Team

Marriott International is the world's largest hotel company, with more brands, more hotels and more opportunities for associates to grow and succeed. Be where you can do your best work, begin your purpose, belong to an amazing global team, and become the best version of you.