{"id":2052149,"url":"https://alion.io/job/robots-pencils-principal-data-scientist-agentic-ai-technical-lead","title":"Technical Director, AI Programs","company":{"id":7662,"name":"Robots & Pencils","domain":"robotsandpencils.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/robots-and-pencils","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":84,"open_postings":8,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.625,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":34,"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["CA","US"],"hiring_countries_total":2,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":104000,"max_usd":192000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":8},"experience_years_min":15,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS Bedrock","optional":false},{"name":"Claude","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"SOC 2","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-07T21:53:32Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-20","last_verified_at":"2026-10-30T15:52:49Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":22,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":22},"description":"We’re looking for a Technical Director to provide senior technical leadership across a large, multi-stream agentic AI program. This is a leadership role, not a hands-on build role. You’ll lead through influence across internal, partner, and vendor teams, making sure every workstream is building the right thing, the right way, and solving the problem the client actually has.\nIn this role, you’ll provide delivery oversight across roughly ten concurrent workstreams and up to about a hundred people. You’ll validate that teams are on the right architectural path, connect their work back to client business outcomes, and step in early when something won’t land. You’ll act as the trusted technical voice with client leadership, working backwards from the outcomes the client is trying to achieve.\nWhy This Role Matters\nAt Robots & Pencils, we design AI systems for a human world. Our name says it all. Robots and pencils means engineering paired with creativity, because every agent we ship has to work for real people in real workflows. That balance is baked into how we operate.\nEvery role here contributes directly to that mission. Here, you shape how AI systems integrate into enterprise operations, how teams move at real velocity, and how products create measurable impact for clients and the people they serve. We ship production-ready AI in 30 to 45 days. That pace demands people who take ownership, lead with craft, and care deeply about what they put their name on.\nWhat You’ll Do\nDelivery & Technical Oversight\nProvide delivery oversight across all agentic AI workstreams, making sure each is on track to the outcomes committed to the client\nValidate that each team is building the right solution architecturally, reviewing designs, diagrams, and tradeoffs closely enough to catch flaws early\nWork backwards from the client’s business outcomes to test whether what’s being built will actually meet the need, and course correct well before a milestone or demo exposes a gap\nRead between the lines of status updates: surface hidden risks, dependency gaps, and unspoken blockers, and push teams to name and resolve them\nJoin solutioning sessions, brainstorms, and client calls as needed to align direction, resolve ambiguity, and reset expectations\nSet and uphold standards for how agentic systems are designed, evaluated, secured, and prepared for production, including multi-agent orchestration, tool calling, RAG, evaluation, observability, and guardrails\nStay close enough to the technology to go deep when it matters, using tools like Claude and Cursor to explore and pressure-test ideas\nCollaboration & Communication\nServe as the senior technical voice to client leadership, translating between architecture detail and business outcomes\nLead across vendors, partner teams, and internal teams you don’t directly manage, building trust and alignment without relying on formal authority\nHold direct conversations when a team is sandbagging or guarded, with the EQ to probe, ask hard questions, and drive to a clear answer, live and in the room, not only in async channels\nPartner with the engagement, product, and strategy leads who own scope and program management so technical direction and delivery stay in step\nCo-define the AI roadmap with client and R&P leadership, operating as a peer in strategic technical conversations\nLeadership & Influence\nAct as the technical authority the whole program can rely on, owning high-stakes calls on architecture, risk, and delivery\nMentor technical leads across streams, raising the bar for how teams build and communicate\nDefine and champion the standards that shape how this program builds and operates agentic AI\nDrive the technical vision for the program as it scales, shaping how the work grows over the long term\nWhat You’ll Bring\n15+ years in engineering, data, or AI, with a career that began as an engineer and moved into leading large programs\nExperience overseeing large, multi-team programs, ideally as a director or senior director who came up through engineering; a principal-level product or technical architect who operated as the right hand to a VP or SVP is also a strong fit\nA history of being held accountable for business outcomes, not just technical delivery\nTechnical depth kept sharp: you can go deep architecturally, diagram a system, weigh tradeoffs, and call out a weak design. You don’t need to be committing code daily\nRecent, real exposure to agentic AI, including agentic platforms or builds, multi-agent orchestration, tool calling, RAG, and evaluation\nStrong judgment in spotting when a team is solving the wrong problem or a solution won’t meet the client’s need\nExceptional communication and EQ, including credibility with senior executives and comfort with conflict and hard conversations\nExperience working across multiple vendors, partners, or organizations to align on shared outcomes\nExperience in a regulated industry such as healthcare, life sciences, banking, insurance, or EdTech, including compliance regimes like SOC 2, ISO, or FERPA. Life sciences domain expertise is not required\nWorking knowledge of AWS and the AWS GenAI offering (e.g., Amazon Bedrock) and other major cloud platforms\nBased in the US or Canada, with solid overlap with US Eastern or Central working hours\nHelpful Extras and Unique Skills\nExperience in both product and services environments, with a clear line from business strategy to delivered outcomes\nA data science or ML background that lets you engage credibly with model and evaluation decisions\nPrior experience working alongside AWS teams or on AWS-partnered engagements\nYou’ll Do Well Here if You Are\nA doer. You see something broken and fix it. You’d rather move on clarity than wait for certainty.\nA fast learner who knows you don’t know everything. The AI landscape changes weekly. You’re senior enough to know better and curious enough to keep learning anyway.\nDirect in a way that makes the work better. You give honest feedback. You’d rather have the hard conversation than blow smoke.\nObsessed with craft. You know genius is in the details. You ship exceptional, not perfect, and you don’t put your name on work you wouldn’t stand behind.\nBuilt for ownership. You honor commitments, admit mistakes fast, and back your teammates when a decision costs something. No handoffs, no finger-pointing.\nAll in. You treat clients’ businesses like your own. You take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously.\nResourceful when the budget, timeline, or team is tight. Constraints don’t slow you down. They sharpen you.\nGlad to be in the room with people who care as much as you do. Our teams average fifteen-plus years of experience. We hire people who push each other to do better work.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6726,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":15,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"},{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["UI/UX Design","Custom Software Development","AI Consulting & Integration"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-07T22:11:43Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":81,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":22,"expected_fill_days":34,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/robots-pencils-principal-data-scientist-agentic-ai-technical-lead","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/robots-pencils-principal-data-scientist-agentic-ai-technical-lead.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-30T18:30:33Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":7572,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-31T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":7662},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=7662"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Frobots-pencils-principal-data-scientist-agentic-ai-technical-lead"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Frobots-pencils-principal-data-scientist-agentic-ai-technical-lead"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Frobots-pencils-principal-data-scientist-agentic-ai-technical-lead"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/robots-pencils-principal-data-scientist-agentic-ai-technical-lead\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Frobots-pencils-principal-data-scientist-agentic-ai-technical-lead"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":2052149}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"robotsandpencils.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":2052149},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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