Job Title: Senior Director AI DevelopmentJob Location: Waterloo, ON (Office based)OpenText's AI Development and Enablement organization designs and delivers AI solutions that power customer-facing products, agents, and intelligent workflows. We work across the product portfolio, bringing new ideas into applications and building the shared AI technology that helps teams innovate faster.
The OpportunityAs Senior Director of AI Development, you will lead the people and engineering programs that bring OpenText's AI solutions to life. Reporting to the VP, you will build capable teams, establish clear delivery priorities, and turn promising ideas into dependable products and services.
You will work with product and architecture leaders to advance AI applications and the platforms that support them. This role offers the opportunity to lead incubation, shape cloud and platform programs, and help teams apply new AI capabilities to enterprise needs. Success means teams that execute well, ideas that progress into useful capabilities, and services that product teams can confidently adopt and depend on.
You Are Great At- Leading engineering delivery across teams, with clear milestones, effective execution, and accountability for quality, reliability, and customer outcomes. Identifying delivery risks early and removing obstacles to progress.
- Hiring, coaching, and developing engineering managers and technical leaders; building teams that combine delivery discipline with curiosity and initiative.
- Shaping roadmaps with product and architecture leaders, managing capacity and dependencies, and making timely priority and investment decisions. Balancing new capabilities with service reliability and technical debt.
- Leading development of AI solutions, cloud services, and platforms, including tools and shared primitives that enable larger enterprise applications.
- Running incubation from focused experiments and customer validation through investment decisions and transition into supported capabilities. Establishing clear criteria for advancing, redirecting, or stopping an initiative.
- Establishing development and operational practices that help application teams adopt shared services, including documentation, release readiness, support ownership, and feedback from consuming teams.
- Guiding technical discussions and encouraging informed experimentation with emerging AI approaches; building partnerships across business units and communicating progress to executives.
What It Takes- 12+ years in software engineering or related disciplines, with a record of delivering complex products and programs across teams through engineering managers and technical leaders.
- Proven people leadership, including developing managers, building technical capability, and improving execution across teams.
- Enterprise software experience is highly desirable, particularly leading platform or cloud programs and delivering tools, services, and reusable capabilities for application teams.
- Experience guiding an applied AI initiative through experimentation and technical decisions into delivery or adoption, with a clear account of your leadership contribution and the outcome.
- Current understanding of applied AI concepts, agent patterns, and development challenges, sufficient to lead AI solution development and engage confidently with architects and engineers. Familiarity with how model choices, context, orchestration, and evaluation affect product behavior and delivery.
- Demonstrated curiosity and technical currency through hands-on exploration, experimentation, or prior development with AI technologies, with the ability to discuss what you learned and how it informs your leadership decisions.
- Sound judgment about AI quality, reliability, security, cost, and operational readiness, with creativity in identifying useful applications and advancing new ideas.
- Strong product partnership, cross-business collaboration, and executive communication skills.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Compensation: At OpenText, we offer a thoughtfully designed benefits package that supports your physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing. As you move through the hiring process, we're happy to provide more details about our compensation programs, including variable and commission compensation opportunities for eligible roles, vacation entitlement, and paid time off.
