Director - AI Process Excellence

Introduction: A Career at HARMAN Automotive

We re a global, multi-disciplinary team that s putting the innovative power of technology to work and transforming tomorrow. At HARMAN Automotive, we give you the keys to fast-track your career.

• Engineer audio systems and integrated technology platforms that augment the driving experience
• Combine ingenuity, in-depth research, and a spirit of collaboration with design and engineering excellence
• Advance in-vehicle infotainment, safety, efficiency, and enjoyment.

About the Role

We are seeking a hands-on technical leader who can drive enterprise-scale AI adoption across our automotive division.

What You Will Do

• Lead the architecture and development of AI platforms focused on internal process excellence.
• Partner with the Automotive Principal Architect to define the architecture, tools, and processes for AI/ML adoption globally.
• Manage a team of five AI practitioners, while mentoring global teams implementing AI solutions.
• Design and implement advanced AI solutions requiring cross value-stream orchestration.
• Influence an AI-first culture across HARMAN s Automotive Digital roadmap as part of the Automotive Digital Leadership coalition.
• Lead development of end-to-end data platforms for agentic AI training, evaluation, and reinforcement, aligned with strategy, budget, and resources.
• Build scalable, real-time pipelines to ingest, transform, and store multimodal data (text, logs, user interactions, actions, environments).
• Design dynamic memory and knowledge systems (vector stores, graph DBs, memory stores).
• Collaborate with researchers to integrate live feedback, human-in-the-loop data, and auto-labeling systems.
• Own data governance, quality, and security policies for self-improving AI agents, aligning with global standards.
• Build observability tools for agent behavior and decision tracking (lineage, reproducibility, versioning).
• Mentor junior engineers and cultivate a high-performance engineering culture.
• Stay ahead of AI infrastructure trends and incorporate best practices into roadmaps.
• Act as subject matter expert for AI engineering internally and externally.
• Manage budgets for AI tools and rigorously measure value generated vs. costs.
• Drive ecosystem partnerships, vendor management, and executive-level influence to advance adoption.

Success Measures

• Division-wide AI adoption.
• Delivery of scalable, enterprise-grade platforms.
• Number of production AI agents driving measurable efficiency and effectiveness gains.

What You Need to Be Successful

• Graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (PhD a plus).
• 10+ years of data engineering experience, including 5+ years in leadership or architecture.
• Expertise in Python and SQL.
• Strong background in real-time streaming frameworks (Kafka, Pulsar, Spark Streaming, Flink).
• Experience building and maintaining data lakes/warehouses (Snowflake, Delta Lake, BigQuery, MS Fabric).
• Hands-on with LLMs, vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS), and agent memory systems.
• Knowledge of MLOps/agent lifecycle tooling (LangChain, MCP, AutoGen, MLflow).
• Cloud-native architecture experience (AWS/GCP/Azure), incl. orchestration (Airflow, dbt).
• Proven ability to influence, lead change, and communicate effectively with stakeholders.

Bonus Points if You Have

• Familiarity with agent frameworks (OpenAI Assistants, LangGraph, AutoGPT, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel).
• Data engineering certification (e.g., DP-600 for MS Fabric).
• Project Management certification (e.g., PMI).
• Advanced cross-cultural leadership and conflict resolution skills.
• Automotive or manufacturing industry knowledge.

What Makes You Eligible

• Willingness to travel up to 20%, including international travel (team collaboration, customers, partners, and conferences).
• Flexibility to work from Bengaluru office.
• Successfully complete a background investigation and drug screen as a condition of employment

What We Offer

• Flexible work environment, allowing for hybrid working model.
• Access to employee discounts on world-class Harman and Samsung products (JBL, HARMAN Kardon, AKG, etc.)
• Extensive training opportunities through our own HARMAN University
• Competitive wellness benefits
• Tuition reimbursement
• Be Brilliant employee recognition and rewards program
• An inclusive and diverse work environment that fosters and encourages professional and personal development

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