As the Head of AI Platform Engineering - Execution Plane, you will lead the development and implementation of our enterprise platform's execution layer including management of agentic AI workloads, model gateways, agent runtimes, tool/action gateways, MCP servers, orchestration frameworks, or AI execution engines.
You will:You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and technology partners to develop and integrate automation solutions that drive business growth, improve customer experiences, and reduce operational costs.
You have:- Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, engineering, management or a related field.
- Strong people leadership experience managing software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing senior technical talent.
- Deep hands-on technical background designing, building, and operating production-grade distributed systems, AI/ML platforms, data platforms, or cloud-native runtime services.
- Experience leading teams responsible for the execution layer of a platform, including runtime services, model inference, retrieval, orchestration, tool invocation, workflow execution, or production AI operations.
- Ability to own the roadmap and delivery for execution plane capabilities such as model gateways, agent runtimes, tool/action gateways, runtime adapters, MCP services, knowledge bases, retrieval pipelines, inference services, and deployment patterns.
- Strong understanding of data access patterns, enterprise APIs, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector/search systems, context engineering, and governed access to systems of record.
- Experience building reliable, scalable, low-latency execution services with clear contracts, strong observability, graceful degradation, retry patterns, rate limits, and operational resilience.
- Ability to partner with control plane, developer experience, data engineering, security, architecture, operations, and domain application teams to ensure execution technologies operate behind governed platform interfaces.
- Proven ability to drive engineering excellence through design reviews, architecture standards, testing, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, incident response, SLOs, runbooks, and production support mechanisms.
- Strong understanding of enterprise security and compliance requirements for runtime execution, including identity propagation, auditability, data handling, least privilege access, secrets management, and environment isolation.
- Strong communication and influence skills, with the ability to simplify complex runtime, data, and AI execution topics for senior stakeholders while aligning teams around reusable platform patterns.
You will: - Experience with agentic AI systems, LLM platforms, model gateways, agent runtimes, tool/action gateways, MCP servers, orchestration frameworks, or AI execution engines.
- Experience with AWS-based AI execution services and cloud-native patterns, including Bedrock, AgentCore, SageMaker, Lambda, Step Functions, API Gateway, EKS, DynamoDB, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, and related DevOps tooling.
- Familiarity with RAG systems, enterprise search, vector databases, embedding models, rerankers, knowledge bases, context engineering, and governed retrieval from enterprise data sources.
- Experience designing multi-tenant runtime platforms with environment isolation, workload identities, RBAC/ABAC, cross-account access patterns, quotas, throttling, and secure service-to-service communication.
- Background in MLOps, LLMOps, AIOps, model lifecycle management, evaluation pipelines, model serving, inference optimization, or production AI operations.
- Experience with observability for AI workloads, including distributed tracing, token usage, latency, model/tool errors, cost attribution, quality metrics, safety metrics, and operational dashboards.
- Experience with performance, scalability, and cost optimization for high-volume runtime services, including caching, batching, streaming, load testing, capacity planning, and GPU/CPU optimization where applicable.
- Experience building reusable platform abstractions, SDKs, runtime adapters, reference architectures, or deployment templates that make execution technologies portable across vendors and use cases.
- Experience integrating enterprise tools, APIs, data services, and workflow systems through governed connectors rather than point-to-point application wiring.
- Comfort operating in a regulated, matrixed environment where production safety, auditability, resiliency, and vendor optionality are core design principles.
Location:- New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania
- Up to 10% travel within US
Our promise:- At Guardian, you'll have the support and flexibility to achieve your professional and personal goals.
- Through skill-building, leadership development and philanthropic opportunities, we provide opportunities to build communities and grow your career, surrounded by diverse colleagues with high ethical standards
We offer:- Meaningful and challenging work opportunities to accelerate technology and innovation in a secure and compliant way
- Competitive compensation
- Excellent medical, dental, supplemental health, life and vision coverage for you and your dependents with no wait period
- Life and disability insurance
- A great 401(k) with match
- Tuition assistance, paid parental leave and backup family care
- Dynamic, modern work environments that promote collaboration and creativity
- Flexible time off, dress code, and work location policies to balance your work and life in the ways that suit you best
- Social responsibility in all aspects of our work. We volunteer within our local communities, create educational alliances with colleges, drive a variety of initiatives in sustainability, and advocate for diversity and inclusion in all that we do.
Salary Range:$152,290.00 - $250,195.00
The salary range reflected above is a good faith estimate of base pay for the primary location of the position. The salary for this position ultimately will be determined based on the education, experience, knowledge, and abilities of the successful candidate. In addition to salary, this role may also be eligible for annual, sales, or other incentive compensation.
Our PromiseAt Guardian, you'll have the support and flexibility to achieve your professional and personal goals. Through skill-building, leadership development and philanthropic opportunities, we provide opportunities to build communities and grow your career, surrounded by diverse colleagues with high ethical standards.
Inspire Well-BeingAs part of Guardian's Purpose - to inspire well-being - we are committed to offering contemporary, supportive, flexible, and inclusive benefits and resources to our colleagues. Explore our company benefits at www.guardianlife.com/careers/corporate/benefits. Benefits apply to full-time eligible employees. Interns are not eligible for most Company benefits.
Current Guardian Colleagues: Please apply through the internal Jobs Hub in Workday.
