Director, AI - Process Excellence

A Career at HARMAN

As a technology leader that is rapidly on the move, HARMAN is filled with people who are focused on making life better. Innovation, inclusivity and teamwork are a part of our DNA. When you add that to the challenges we take on and solve together, you'll discover that at HARMAN you can grow, make a difference and be proud of the work you do every day.

About the Role

We are seeking a hands-on technical leader who can drive enterprise-scale AI adoption across our automotive division.

What You Will Do

• Lead the architecture and development of AI platforms focused on internal process excellence.
• Partner with the Automotive Principal Architect to define the architecture, tools, and processes for AI/ML adoption globally.
• Manage a team of five AI practitioners, while mentoring global teams implementing AI solutions.
• Design and implement advanced AI solutions requiring cross-value-stream orchestration.
• Influence an AI-first culture across HARMAN's Automotive Digital roadmap as part of the Automotive Digital Leadership coalition.
• Lead development of end-to-end data platforms for agentic AI training, evaluation, and reinforcement, aligned with strategy, budget, and resources.
• Build scalable, real-time pipelines to ingest, transform, and store multimodal data (text, logs, user interactions, actions, environments).
• Design dynamic memory and knowledge systems (vector stores, graph DBs, memory stores).
• Collaborate with researchers to integrate live feedback, human-in-the-loop data, and auto-labeling systems.
• Own data governance, quality, and security policies for self-improving AI agents, aligning with global standards.
• Build observability tools for agent behavior and decision tracking (lineage, reproducibility, versioning).
• Mentor junior engineers and cultivate a high-performance engineering culture.
• Stay ahead of AI infrastructure trends and incorporate best practices into roadmaps.
• Act as subject matter expert for AI engineering internally and externally.
• Manage budgets for AI tools and rigorously measure value generated vs. costs.
• Drive ecosystem partnerships, vendor management, and executive-level influence to advance adoption.

Success Measures

• Division-wide AI adoption.
• Delivery of scalable, enterprise-grade platforms.
• Number of production AI agents driving measurable efficiency and effectiveness gains.

What You Need to Be Successful

• Graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (PhD a plus).
• 10+ years of data engineering experience, including 5+ years in leadership or architecture.
• Expertise in Python and SQL.
• Strong background in real-time streaming frameworks (Kafka, Pulsar, Spark Streaming, Flink).
• Experience building and maintaining data lakes/warehouses (Snowflake, Delta Lake, BigQuery, MS Fabric).
• Hands-on with LLMs, vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS), and agent memory systems.
• Knowledge of MLOps/agent lifecycle tooling (LangChain, MCP, AutoGen, MLflow).
• Cloud-native architecture experience (AWS/Google Cloud Platform/Azure), incl. orchestration (Airflow, dbt).
• Proven ability to influence, lead change, and communicate effectively with stakeholders.

Bonus Points if You Have

• Familiarity withagent frameworks(OpenAI Assistants, LangGraph, AutoGPT, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel).
• Data engineering certification (e.g., DP-600 for MS Fabric).
• Project Management certification (e.g., PMI).
• Advanced cross-cultural leadership and conflict resolution skills.
• Automotive or manufacturing industry knowledge.

What Makes You Eligible

• Willingness to travel up to 20%, including international travel (team collaboration, customers, partners, and conferences).
• Flexibility to work remotely or from a US HARMAN office hub.
• Successfully complete a background investigation and drug screen as a condition of employment

What We Offer

• Access to employee discounts on world-class products (JBL, HARMAN Kardon, AKG, and more)
• Extensive training opportunities through our own HARMAN University
• Competitive wellness benefits
• Tuition reimbursement
• "Be Brilliant" employee recognition and rewards program
• An inclusive and diverse work environment that fosters and encourages professional and personal development

#LI-Hybrid

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Salary Ranges:

$ 185,250 - $ 271,700

HARMAN is proud to be an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.