Senior Director, AI Engineering and Delivery
Abbott
5 - 10 years
Illinois
Posted: 05/04/2026
Job Description
JOB DESCRIPTION:
Executive Summary
The organization is making a strategic investment in AI and Generative AI and is creating a senior leadership role to architect, scale, and operationalize AI as a core platform capability.
This is a rare opportunity for a deeply technical, platform-oriented AI leader to shape how AI is engineered, governed, and consumed across a complex, regulated, multi business environment—moving the organization from pockets of innovation to enterprise-wide AI at scale.
The Head of AI Engineering and Delivery will lead the design, build, and evolution of enterprise AI and Generative AI teams and platforms for a global organization operating in life science, medical technology-driven markets. This leader will bring deep technical credibility across software engineering, data engineering, AI / machine learning, and cloud-native architecture, combined with a proven ability to build and lead technical teams operating within a highly regulated environment.
The role is responsible for creating reusable, secure, and scalable AI capabilities that empower product teams, business units, and operations to rapidly develop and deploy AI-driven solutions. The role will serve as a senior engineering and architecture authority for AI platforms, ensuring consistency, governance, and speed while enabling innovation across the enterprise.
Strategic Mandate
- Build and lead a new AI Engineering & Delivery organization operating across three layers: Platform, Delivery, and Enablement
- Establish AI and GenAI as core enterprise platforms, not bespoke solutions.
- Enable self-service AI capabilities for product, engineering, and analytics teams.
- Balance innovation velocity with regulatory compliance and operational resilience.
- Drive measurable business outcomes across customer experience, risk, operations, and productivity.
- Build and lead delivery teams to execute on the strategic mandate, developing a future focused delivery operating model.
Key Responsibilities
Define & Execute AI Platform Strategy
- Set and drive a unified, cross-business-unit AI platform strategy, ensuring seamless integration across products, services, and geographies
- Establish AI and GenAI as core enterprise platforms — not one-off solutions
- Champion API-first, platform-based architectures that accelerate time-to-market while reducing total cost of ownership
- Drive alignment across architecture proposals to maximize reuse, standardization, and leverage of shared AI and software services
- Plan and implement overall AI strategy; develop enterprise priorities and facilitate business and IT governance related to information design and business insight delivery
Build & Scale AI Engineering Delivery
- Build and lead the AI Engineering & Delivery organization spanning Platform, Delivery, and Enablement
- Establish best-in-class delivery practices for AI, Software, and Data Engineering — including discovery, build, test, automation, validation, observability, and reliability
- Own the end-to-end AI and data engineering ecosystem: cloud-native platforms, AI/ML systems, connectivity, and secure data pipelines
- Drive end-to-end observability across data pipelines, model inference, tool execution, and agent outcomes — with clear SLIs/SLOs for quality, latency, reliability, and cost
- Standardize ML and agent development workflows to reduce time-to-production and eliminate bespoke infrastructure across teams
Enable GenAI & Emerging Technology at Scale
- Partner with business unit leaders to incubate, industrialize, and scale AI and Generative AI capabilities, including:
- Machine learning and advanced analytics
- GenAI copilots, autonomous agents, and intelligent assistants
- Agent lifecycle management: CI/CD, model registries, lineage, and access control
- RAG, prompt orchestration, evaluation, and guardrails
- Process optimization and reengineering
- Modern data science platforms and development frameworks
- Make agent evaluation and experimentation default platform capabilities — offline evaluation, pre-deployment quality gates and continuous post-deployment monitoring
- Translate innovation into production-grade, governed AI systems that deliver measurable business value
Governance, Risk & Responsible AI
- Embed Responsible AI principles into platform design and engineering practices from the start
- Partner with Risk, Compliance, Legal, and Security to ensure model governance, lifecycle controls, and regulatory compliance across jurisdictions
- Ensure AI-enabled systems meet enterprise standards for security, performance, resilience, and regulatory compliance — including FDA, SOX, MoH, and regulations applicable to pharmaceutical, food, and medical device industries
- Implement and maintain compliance controls and policies applicable to pharmaceutical, food, and medical device industries
- Act as a senior voice in AI risk and governance forums across the enterprise
Organizational Leadership & Influence
- Recruit, develop, and retain world-class technical talent; foster a culture of excellence, accountability, and continuous learning
- Provide clear leadership, mentoring, and guidance to senior leaders, principal engineers, and architects across the enterprise
- Act as a connective force across Technology, Product, Operations, Cybersecurity, Compliance, and Commercial teams
- Serve as a trusted advisor to executive leadership on technology strategy, investment decisions, and transformation roadmaps
- Work in partnership with business and IT to govern total cost of investment for existing reporting environments with a focus on standardization and consolidation
Required Experience & Background
Technical & Platform Foundation
- 15+ years of experience in software engineering and large-scale platform development.
- Demonstrated success building and scaling enterprise platforms in financial services, fintech, or global technology firms.
- Strong expertise in:
- Distributed systems and modern software architecture
- Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) in regulated environments
- API, microservices, and event-driven architectures
- Platform reliability, observability, and cost management
AI, ML & GenAI Expertise
- Proven track record delivering production AI and ML systems in real-world, regulated contexts.
- Hands-on experience with: Machine learning lifecycle management (MLOps); Model monitoring, retraining, and performance management; Generative AI and foundation models (LLMs); RAG, prompt orchestration, evaluation, and guardrails; Experience operationalizing AI with risk controls, explainability, and governance.
Leadership & Enterprise Impact
- Experience leading large, globally distributed engineering teams.
- Strong stakeholder management skills across Technology, Risk, Compliance, and Business leadership.
- Demonstrated ability to shift organizations toward platform-led, reuse-driven delivery models.
- Track record of aligning AI platform investments to revenue growth, cost efficiency, risk reduction, or customer outcomes.
Education
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical discipline required.
- Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or Data Science preferred.
Leadership Characteristics
- Proven leader of large, global, multidisciplinary teams
- Platform mindset with a bias toward reuse, leverage, and scale
- Clear communicator who can translate complexity into executive-level decisions.
- Credible with engineers and influential with senior business and risk leaders
- Technically authoritative yet business oriented.
- Comfortable operating in highly regulated, high-stakes environments.
Success Profile (First 12–24 Months)
- A unified AI and GenAI platform is live and broadly adopted across the enterprise.
- Product and business teams can rapidly build AI capabilities using standardized services.
- AI risk, governance, and compliance are embedded by design, not retrofitted.
- AI engineering is viewed as a strategic technology capability enabling speed, safety, and scale, delivering measurable outcomes.
The base pay for this position is
$190,000.00 – $380,000.00In specific locations, the pay range may vary from the range posted.
JOB FAMILY:
IT Business Relationship Management
DIVISION:
BTS Business Technology Services
LOCATION:
United States > Abbott Park : AP06C
ADDITIONAL LOCATIONS:
United States > Chicago : Willis Tower Building 233 S Wacker Dr.
WORK SHIFT:
Standard
TRAVEL:
Yes, 15 % of the Time
MEDICAL SURVEILLANCE:
Not Applicable
SIGNIFICANT WORK ACTIVITIES:
Continuous sitting for prolonged periods (more than 2 consecutive hours in an 8 hour day)Abbott is an Equal Opportunity Employer of Minorities/Women/Individuals with Disabilities/Protected Veterans.
EEO is the Law link - English: http://webstorage.abbott.com/common/External/EEO_English.pdf
EEO is the Law link - Espanol: http://webstorage.abbott.com/common/External/EEO_Spanish.pdf
About Company
Abbott is a global healthcare company developing medical devices, diagnostic tools, nutritional products, and medicines. It focuses on improving health outcomes across areas like heart disease, diabetes, and infectious diseases, with a strong emphasis on research and innovation.
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