{"id":1226223,"url":"https://alion.io/job/straive-senior-director-ai-software-engineering","title":"Senior Director - AI & Software Engineering","company":{"id":1040311,"name":"Straive","domain":"straive.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/straive-2","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":null,"truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"head","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Bengaluru, India","Gurgaon, India","Noida, India","Pune, India","Mumbai, India","Chennai, India","Hyderabad, India","India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":27000,"max_usd":71000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":67},"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Quantization","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"LLMOps","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-22T04:14:59Z","employer_posted_date":null,"last_verified_at":"2026-09-22T04:14:59Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":null,"days_open":12,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":12},"description":"Director - AI & Software Engineering\n\nStraive is seeking a hands-on technology leader to serve as the senior technical authority for our AI, analytics, and software engineering solutions.\n\nAbout the Role:\n\nYou will set technical direction, resolve complex engineering challenges, and move solutions from prototype to secure, scalable production.\n\nThe role combines architecture and execution leadership including a mandate to improve enterprise AI economics through fit-for-purpose frontier, open-source, and smaller models.\n\nThis is not a conventional delivery-governance role.\n\nYou will remain close to the technology, lead critical design and code reviews, mentor teams, and take accountability for high-stakes technical outcomes.\n\nKey Responsibilities:\n\nProduction-Grade Engineering:\n\n- Own engineering standards across architecture, development, testing, deployment, security, observability, and documentation.\n\n- Ensure prototypes have a credible production path; introduce architecture and code reviews, automated testing, quality gates, and release-readiness checks.\n\n- Close gaps in scalability, performance, reliability, maintainability, and security from design through deployment.\n\nAI Architecture and Economics:\n\n- Define scalable, reliable, and cost-effective AI/GenAI architectures based on accuracy, cost, latency, privacy, and deployment needs.\n\n- Lead selection, evaluation, fine-tuning, optimization, and deployment of frontier, open-source, small, and domain-specific models.\n\n- Reduce operating cost through model routing, caching, quantization, batching, retrieval and prompt optimization; design robust RAG and agentic systems with evaluation, guardrails, monitoring, and human oversight.\n\nTechnical Architecture and Platforms:\n\n- Serve as the final escalation point for complex architecture, performance, security, and deployment issues.\n\n- Guide modular applications, APIs, microservices, data pipelines, AI services, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations.\n\n- Promote reusable components and strong cloud-native, CI/CD, observability, data governance, and secure-development practices.\n\nTeam Capability:\n\n- Mentor architects, engineering leads, data scientists, and developers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical workshops.\n\n- Build independent problem-solving capability, identify skill gaps, and support targeted hiring and development.\n\n- Create a culture of engineering ownership, technical rigor, experimentation, and continuous improvement.\n\nClient Solutioning and Innovation:\n\n- Partner with commercial, consulting, and delivery teams on client workshops, proposals, due diligence, and solution design.\n\n- Assess feasibility, architecture, effort, risk, and operating cost; translate business problems into pragmatic technical roadmaps.\n\n- Develop reference architectures and accelerators that strengthen Straive's differentiation and delivery speed.\n\nRequired Experience and Qualifications:\n\n- 12 - 18 years across software engineering, architecture, data platforms, AI/ML, or related roles, including experience in a startup, product company, or similarly fast-moving environment.\n\n- Proven ownership of enterprise-grade software, data, or AI products from architecture through production adoption.\n\n- Strong hands-on engineering background, preferably in Python and modern backend/frontend technologies.\n\n- Practical GenAI experience spanning RAG, vector search, agentic workflows, model evaluation, safety controls, and production monitoring.\n\n- Strong command of distributed systems, APIs, microservices, cloud-native architecture, enterprise integration, and at least one major cloud platform.\n\n- Working knowledge of containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, observability, secure development, and modern data platforms.\n\n- Demonstrated ability to improve solution cost, latency, scalability, reliability, and engineering quality.\n\n- Experience mentoring senior technical professionals and communicating complex decisions to business and client leaders.\n\nPreferred Experience:\n\n- Multi-tenant platforms, reusable AI accelerators, MLOps/LLMOps, model governance, or regulated and security-sensitive environments.\n\n- Technical pre-sales, client workshops, proposals, solution estimation, and technical due diligence.\n\n- A track record of taking multiple AI or software products from concept to sustained production use.\n\nLeadership Profile:\n\n- Hands-on and accountable: Stays close to code and architecture and drives critical issues to resolution.\n\n- Commercially pragmatic: Balances technical ambition with client value, speed, maintainability, and cost.\n\n- Constructive challenger: Identifies weaknesses early, challenges assumptions, and raises engineering standards.\n\n- Capability builder: Develops strong, independent teams rather than becoming the sole source of expertise.\n\nWhy Join Straive?:\n\nYou will shape how enterprise-grade AI solutions are architected, built, and scaled with the mandate to influence technical strategy, strengthen engineering practices, develop high-performing teams, and deliver differentiated solutions for global clients.\n\nSkills\nIT Product Development, Technical Architect, CTO, AI Product Development, Artificial Intelligence","description_format":"text","description_chars":5244,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":12,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","E-learning","Data Entry & Processing","Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T13:06:44Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":12,"expected_fill_days":35,"reasons":["seen:12","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-04T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/straive-senior-director-ai-software-engineering","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/straive-senior-director-ai-software-engineering.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-05T00:13:17Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":152,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":4848,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-06T00:00:00Z"}}}