Harrison and Star

Executive Director, AI

Harrison and Star • $150K — $250K *
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of experience in AI and automation leadership roles
  • Expertise in solution architecture, advanced coding, and automation engineering
  • Proven track record of building and deploying AI solutions at scale
  • Strong project management skills and ability to direct multidisciplinary teams
  • Experience with best practices in QA, security, and compliance

Responsibilities

  • Set strategic vision and roadmap for AI initiatives
  • Oversee architecture decisions and productization strategies
  • Lead cross-functional teams in AI solution design and deployment
  • Manage the delivery lifecycle from design to deployment and optimization
  • Build a robust talent pipeline in AI and automation engineering

Benefits

  • Opportunity to lead cutting-edge AI and automation initiatives
  • Collaborative and multidisciplinary work environment
  • Professional growth and capability-building programs
  • Ownership of high-impact projects with measurable outcomes
Full Job Description
Agency:
Hearts & Science

Job Function:
Media

Job Subfunction:
Media Planning and Buying

Job Description:

Role Purpose
Lead Hearts United's AI and Automation team and own what we build, why it matters, and how approved opportunities move from technical definition to live solution. Reporting to the Chief Transformation Officer, this role turns AI from potential into measurable value by delivering secure, reliable, and scalable agents, automations, and connected workflows.

The Leadership Mandate
  • Own What We Build and Why: Set the technical portfolio, make build versus reuse decisions, and direct capacity to the highest-value opportunities.
  • Lead the Builders: Direct solution architecture, advanced coding, prompt engineering, integrations, testing, deployment, and support.
  • Automate, Augment, Productize: Make today's work faster, change how work gets done, and scale proven solutions when value, demand, and reliability are demonstrated.
  • Build for Production: Move beyond prototypes through clear architecture, acceptance criteria, human oversight, QA, documentation, monitoring, and release controls.


Role Overview

This is the senior leader accountable for Hearts United's AI and automation practice, team, and builds. Operations and Business Strategy own intake, qualification, prioritization, and orchestration. This leader listens in as the technical authority, assessing feasibility, data readiness, effort, risk, and reuse, then takes accountability once an opportunity is approved for build.

The Chief Transformation Officer owns the broader transformation strategy, operating model, investment, and enterprise tradeoffs. This leader owns technical direction, solution quality, delivery, and day-to-day leadership of the AI and Automation team, partnering with account teams, product, technology, data, operations, legal, and client stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

AI Portfolio, Architecture & Build Leadership
  • Set the technical vision and roadmap for AI agents, automations, and connected intelligent workflows.
  • Own decisions on architecture, sequencing, reuse, configuration, net-new build, and productization.
  • Lead solution design across agent architecture, prompt systems, orchestration, APIs, data pipelines, authentication, integrations, and output experiences.
  • Establish development standards, reusable patterns, shared prompt and component libraries, documentation, and responsible AI controls.

Team Leadership & Delivery Management
  • Lead and develop the multidisciplinary team across AI solutions, solutions engineering, automation engineering, data engineering, QA, deployment, and support.
  • Turn approved opportunities into actionable engineering briefs with requirements, acceptance criteria, data readiness, success measures, and named owners.
  • Direct onshore, nearshore, and offshore delivery as one team, using structured handoffs, visible backlogs, decision logs, and release evidence.
  • Manage capacity against the highest-value work while protecting quality, reliability, scalability, and speed.

Solution Deployment & Oversight
  • Lead the delivery lifecycle after approval: define, design, build, validate, deploy, measure, optimize, repeat.
  • Own build quality through code review, prompt evaluation, technical and expertise QA, security and access controls, and release decisions.
  • Ensure every launch includes the documentation, enablement, monitoring, and support needed to become part of the work.
  • Prove contained use cases, establish repeatable delivery, and scale cross-account reuse and production support.

AI Engineering Talent & Capability Building
  • Build a high-performing pipeline of AI engineering, automation, data, and prompt engineering talent.
  • Establish shared coding patterns, prompt libraries, reusable components, peer review, and technical documentation.
  • Create clear ownership and a disciplined operating cadence across handoffs, sprint reviews, architecture gates, releases, and monthly value reviews.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
  • Production & Flow: Approved solutions moved into live workflows, with predictable cycle time from technical definition to release.
  • Quality & Reliability: Accuracy, uptime, defect rates, response quality, security, and adherence to standards.
  • Adoption & Value: Active usage, hours released, faster turnaround, fewer errors, improved decisions, cost reduction, and revenue enabled.
  • Scale & Reuse: Solutions, components, prompts, and integrations adopted beyond the original account or workflow.
  • Team Health: Capability growth, clear ownership, documentation quality, and delivery against roadmap commitments.

150,000-250,000

Omnicom's policy requires employees to work in the office for a minimum of three days a week, unless additional in-office days are directed by their agency or manager. Our objective is to increase this requirement over time, and many of our agencies as well as Omnicom's corporate group already require five days of in-office attendance.

About Harrison and Star

Harrison and Star is a healthcare advertising agency that provides marketing and advertising services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The company offers a range of services including brand strategy, creative development, digital marketing, and market research. Harrison and Star was founded in 1986 and is headquartered in New York, New York.
Learn more about Harrison and Star
Size
500 employees
Industry
Founded
1986
NASDAQ

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