Director, AI Engineer - Fuelight

Role Overview The Director, AI Engineer is responsible for leading the delivery, adoption, and evolution of artificial intelligence engineering capabilities for one of the prioritized digital products within the Global Digital Network Fuelight. Fuelight 360 is Coca-Cola's enterprise resource allocation and investment optimization capability. It is a tailor-made, always-on System capability that uses advanced data, analytics, AI, and GenAI to help Coca-Cola and its bottling partners make better decisions about where and how to invest marketing and trade spend. Reporting into the Senior Director, AI Engineering Lead, this role translates enterprise AI engineering strategy into delivery execution, reusable capabilities, and engineering practices to power our Fuelight 360 solution. The Director leads AI engineers and technical specialists while partnering closely with Product, Data Science, Product Engineering, and Core Technology teams to ensure AI solutions achieve intended business outcomes and align with enterprise standards. The successful candidate is a highly credible technical leader who can operate as a player-coach when needed, balancing strategic thinking with practical delivery execution. They are passionate about developing engineering talent, advancing AI engineering maturity, and helping product teams successfully adopt emerging AI technologies. What You'll Do for Us Design, develop, and operationalize AI capabilities within Fuelight 360, translating business and analytical requirements into scalable production solutions Evaluate, design, and implement generative AI and agent-based solutions that improve decision support, scenario planning, user guidance, and insight generation within Fuelight 360. Translate enterprise AI strategy, architecture standards, and platform capabilities into actionable Fuelight 360 delivery roadmap and implementation plans. Provide technical expertise on AI architecture, model integration patterns, and emerging AI technologies to support Fuelight's product roadmap and long-term strategy. Partner with Fuelight Product Managers, Technical Leads, Data Scientists, and Product Engineering leaders to prioritize and deliver high-value AI solutions Ensure effective implementation of MLOps, LLMOps, and AgentOps practices, including lifecycle management, deployment automation, observability, monitoring, and operational governance. Drive adoption of enterprise AI standards, reusable patterns, development tools, and engineering best practices across product teams. Lead the design, development, deployment, and operation of production AI applications, LLM-powered products, and agent-based solutions. Manage and develop AI engineering teams, providing coaching, technical direction, performance leadership, and career development. Establish engineering quality standards through architecture reviews, code reviews, testing practices, and operational readiness assessments. Partner with Core Technology teams to leverage enterprise AI platforms, orchestration services, and foundational capabilities while identifying opportunities for enhancement. Ensure AI solutions comply with enterprise governance, security, responsible AI, privacy, and risk management requirements. Drive AI observability and operational excellence through monitoring, evaluation, performance optimization, and continuous improvement practices. Support the delivery of enterprise digital twin, forecasting, simulation, optimization, and intelligent automation capabilities. Evaluate emerging AI technologies and engineering approaches and recommend opportunities that improve delivery effectiveness and business impact. Foster a culture of experimentation, learning, collaboration, and engineering excellence across AI engineering teams. Requirements & Qualifications Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Software Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical discipline. 8+ years of experience in software engineering, AI engineering, machine learning engineering, platform engineering, or related technical disciplines. 5+ years of experience leading engineering teams, technical leads, or specialized engineering functions. Demonstrated experience delivering production AI solutions, including generative AI, large language model applications, intelligent agents, and machine learning systems. Experience leading delivery across multiple products or business domains in a matrixed environment. Strong expertise in agentic AI architectures, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), GraphRAG, semantic search, vector databases, knowledge graphs, and AI orchestration frameworks. Hands-on technical expertise in Python and cloud-native application development, with Azure preferred. Experience implementing and operating MLOps, LLMOps, and AgentOps capabilities in production environments. Experience establishing engineering standards, reusable frameworks, development accelerators, and operationa