{"id":2509198,"url":"https://alion.io/job/suntory-global-spirits-technical-director-core-ai-engineering","title":"Technical Director Core AI Engineering","company":{"id":1758036,"name":"Suntory Global Spirits","domain":"suntoryglobalspirits.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/suntoryglobalspirits","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"SuccessFactors","truth_index":null},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","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":["Madrid, Spain"],"countries":["ES"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":90000,"max_usd":202000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":3645},"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"LLMOps","optional":false},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Reranking","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-25T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-25","last_verified_at":"2026-10-15T12:07:01Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":20,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":20},"description":"At Suntory Global Spirits, we craft spirits of the highest quality and deliver brilliant experiences to people around the world. Suntory Global Spirits has evolved into the world's third largest leading premium spirits company ... where each employee is treated like family and trusted with legacy. With our greatest assets - our premium spirits and our people - we're driving growth through impactful marketing, innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit. Suntory Global Spirits is a place where you can come Unleash your Spirit by making an impact each and every day.\nWhat makes this a great opportunity?\nThis is a hands-on director-level technical leadership role with a clear mission: identify, design, and validate the next enterprise AI capabilities with the greatest potential to create business value.\nThe Director of Core AI Engineering will set the technical direction and operating model for emerging and complex enterprise AI capabilities, combining accountable technical leadership with direct involvement in architecture, critical engineering decisions, prototypes, enterprise integrations, code and design reviews, and technical validation.\nYou will lead a small, highly capable team and partner closely with AI Product Delivery, data, security, infrastructure, and application-engineering leaders to prove what is technically possible, resolve key architectural and integration questions, and create the technical blueprint and evidence needed for capabilities to be industrialized by delivery teams.\nRole Responsibilities\nSet the Core AI engineering direction\nOwn the technical exploration roadmap, target architecture, and engineering standards for emerging enterprise AI capabilities.\nDefine architectural boundaries, design assumptions, and technical decision criteria in partnership with Product Delivery, data, security, infrastructure, and engineering teams.\nMake pragmatic decisions on architecture, model access and routing, orchestration, retrieval, integrations, and build-versus-buy choices.\nCreate reusable reference patterns for AI orchestration, enterprise integrations, evaluation, observability, security, context management, and LLMOps.\nOwn the advanced AI systems stack\nArchitect and validate agent runtimes, including single- and multi-agent orchestration, workflow routing, human-in-the-loop controls, retries, fallbacks, and recovery mechanisms.\nDesign and test RAG and enterprise retrieval approaches, including ingestion, embeddings, vector indexing, hybrid retrieval, access controls, reranking, and knowledge-graph approaches.\nPrototype context-engineering, caching, memory, tool-using AI systems, and closed-loop improvement mechanisms.\nEstablish viable model-serving and inference designs, including gateways, routing, latency, scalability, cost, performance, and fallback requirements.\nSelect and test fit-for-purpose technologies based on measurable technical evidence.\nLead technical incubation and validated handoff\nLead prioritized use cases through discovery, prototype, enterprise integration, evaluation, security review, and technical handoff.\nRemain hands-on in architecture, design and code reviews, critical prototypes, technical problem solving, and readiness decisions.\nDefine reference implementations, interfaces, quality evidence, non-functional requirements, limitations, and acceptance criteria for industrialization.\nEstablish clear handoff and knowledge-transfer points with delivery, platform, security, and operations teams.\nValidate quality, safety, and technical readiness\nEstablish measurable evaluation approaches covering quality, groundedness, retrieval performance, tool reliability, safety, latency, cost, and regression detection.\nInstrument prototypes to capture system behaviour, usage, failures, traces, model and prompt versions, latency, cost, and user feedback.\nPartner with security and data-governance teams to implement appropriate controls for sensitive data, AI security risks, access, and unreliable outputs.\nBalance ambitious experimentation with disciplined engineering practices.\nBuild the team and operating model\nLead, mentor, and develop senior AI and platform engineers, setting priorities and technical quality standards.\nDrive architecture reviews and technical decision-making across the AI portfolio.\nChampion technical learning, reference architectures, and standards that enable delivery teams to scale proven capabilities.\nQualifications\nRequired\n12+ years of engineering, data, platform, or technology-delivery experience, including significant leadership responsibility in complex enterprise environments.\nDemonstrated experience designing and validating enterprise AI, generative AI, or intelligent-automation capabilities through working implementation and technical handoff.\nStrong experience in enterprise architecture, systems integration, cloud/data/application platforms, and secure engineering practices.\nPractical experience with AI orchestration, evaluation, observability, security, and adoption practices.\nAbility to lead distributed technical teams and establish scalable engineering, DevOps, SRE, and quality practices.\nStrong technical communication and decision-making skills.\nPreferred\nExperience creating reusable AI reference architectures and standards.\nKnowledge of vector databases, embeddings, hybrid retrieval, agentic workflows, structured tool calling, context management, model serving, evaluation, and observability.\nExperience in a global consumer-goods organization or similarly complex distributed enterprise.\nWhile relocation, immigration, and/or tax compliance support are not guaranteed, we may offer assistance to successful candidates depending on factors such as role requirements in accordance with company guidelines.\nAt Suntory Global Spirits, people are our number one priority, and we believe our people grow together in diverse and inclusive environments where their unique insights, experiences and backgrounds are valued and respected. Suntory Global Spirits is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, military veteran status and all other characteristics, attributes or choices protected by law. 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