Senior Director, Global Head of Solution Development & AI Platforms

What success looks like in this role:

Unisys is an AI-first company — and this role is at the heart of that transformation. The Senior Director, Global Head of Solution Development & AI Platforms is a deeply technical, hands-on engineering leader responsible for architecting, building, and scaling the software platforms that power Unisys Digital Workplace Solutions worldwide.

This is not a purely strategic or managerial role. We are seeking a proven software engineering leader who can write and review code, set architectural direction, hold teams to engineering excellence, and accelerate the delivery of production-grade AI systems. You will own the full engineering lifecycle of the Service Experience Accelerator (SEA) — our flagship AI platform — alongside a broad portfolio of automation, data, and orchestration services delivered to enterprise clients globally.

The ideal candidate has built and shipped complex distributed systems, led platform engineering organisations at scale (ideally in a hyperscaler or enterprise software environment), and is deeply fluent in modern AI/ML engineering, cloud-native development, and Agile delivery. You bring the hands-on credibility to earn the trust of senior engineers as well as the leadership range to operate at the executive level.

1. Software Engineering & Platform Development Leadership

Own the full software development lifecycle (SDLC) for the SEA platform and all Digital Workplace solution engineering. This means writing and reviewing code, setting language and framework standards, and making critical architecture decisions — not just overseeing from a distance.

• Lead hands-on design and code review across microservices, APIs, and AI-integrated application layers
• Set and enforce engineering standards: code quality gates, test coverage thresholds, security practices, and CI/CD pipeline configuration in Azure DevOps (ADO)
• Drive the architecture of cloud-native applications on Azure, including containerised services (Docker/Kubernetes), serverless functions, and event-driven patterns
• Define and evolve the ADO engineering workflow: branching strategy, pull request standards, build pipelines, release gates, and sprint cadence
• Own technical debt strategy — prioritising refactoring, deprecation, and modernisation alongside feature delivery
• Ensure engineering documentation is rigorous: system design docs, API contracts, runbooks, and architectural decision records (ADRs)

2. AI/ML Engineering & AI-First Platform Development

Champion Unisys’ AI-first strategy by engineering AI capabilities that are production-grade, observable, and scalable. This is applied AI engineering — not research or strategy in isolation.

• Architect and oversee the engineering of LLM-powered applications, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, prompt engineering frameworks, and agentic orchestration patterns
• Lead integration of Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, and related services into the SEA platform and client-facing solutions
• Build robust MLOps practices: model versioning, A/B testing, performance monitoring, drift detection, and automated retraining pipelines
• Evaluate and adopt AI frameworks including LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, and vector database solutions (e.g., Azure AI Search, Pinecone, Weaviate)
• Implement responsible AI engineering guardrails: content filtering, grounding, hallucination mitigation, audit logging, and bias monitoring
• Develop AI-powered capabilities including enterprise copilots, intelligent workflow automation, predictive analytics, and NLP-driven knowledge retrieval
• Establish engineering benchmarks for AI system performance: latency, token efficiency, recall/precision, and end-to-end task completion rates

3. Agile Engineering Delivery & Azure DevOps (ADO) Excellence

Agile is not a process overlay here — it is the engineering operating model. You will drive disciplined, high-velocity delivery through a mature ADO environment.

• Own the ADO organisation: configure and govern boards, repos, pipelines, test plans, and artefact feeds across global engineering teams
• Drive sprint planning, backlog refinement, and velocity management with a >

  You will be successful in this role if you have:

  Required Experience

  • 12–18+ years of progressive software engineering and platform development experience, including 5+ years leading global engineering organisations
  • Demonstrable hands-on software development background: the ability to write, review, and debate code at a senior level is a baseline requirement for this role
  • Deep expertise in cloud-native application development on Microsoft Azure: App Services, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, Service Bus, and Event Grid
  • Production experience engineering AI/ML systems: LLM application development, RAG architectures, vector databases, prompt engineering, and MLOps pipelines
  • Expert-level Azure DevOps (ADO) proficiency: pipeline authoring (YAML), board configuration, test plan management, artefact management, and reporting
  • Strong command of modern software engineering practices: clean code principles, SOLID design, microservices patterns, API design, and test-driven development (TDD)
  • Proven track record delivering complex enterprise SaaS or platform products at global scale
  • Experience operating in enterprise IT environments with security, compliance, and governance requirements (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR-aware engineering)

  Preferred Experience

  • Prior engineering or product engineering leadership at a hyperscaler, enterprise software company, or large system integrator (e.g., Microsoft, IBM, Accenture, DXC, ServiceNow)
  • Hands-on experience with Microsoft AI/ML ecosystem: Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Foundry, Azure Machine Learning, Cognitive Services
  • Experience with AI agent frameworks: LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, or comparable orchestration libraries
  • Background in digital workplace, enterprise service management, or employee experience platforms
  • Experience building and operating multi-region, multi-tenant enterprise platforms with high availability (99.9%+)
  • Familiarity with ServiceNow platform engineering and integration patterns

  Technical Skills Profile

  Candidates should be able to demonstrate depth across the following areas in interview:

  • Engineering depth: Languages & Frameworks
  • Python (AI/ML workloads), C# / .NET, TypeScript / React, and at least one additional backend language
  • Platform architecture: Cloud & Infrastructure
  • Azure-native architecture, AKS, IaC (Terraform or Bicep), container security, networking fundamentals
  • Applied AI systems: AI/ML Engineering
  • LLM APIs, RAG pipeline design, embedding models, vector search, agentic patterns, evaluation frameworks
  • Agile & DevOps: Engineering Delivery
  • ADO pipeline authoring, YAML CI/CD, GitFlow, release management, DevSecOps toolchain (SonarQube, Defender, Aqua)

  Leadership & Behavioural Attributes

  • Engineering credibility: earns respect from senior individual contributors through technical depth, not just organisational authority
  • Builder mentality: energised by creating things from scratch, comfortable with ambiguity, and decisive under uncertainty
  • Outcome orientation: measures success by shipped software and measurable client impact, not activity or process compliance
  • Clear communicator: able to move fluently between whiteboard architecture discussions and board-level business conversations
  • Talent multiplier: invests disproportionately in developing engineers and creating an environment where great people want to stay

  Education

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related engineering discipline — required
  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI/ML, or Engineering preferred; equivalent depth demonstrated through engineering output and technical leadership equally considered

  HOW SUCCESS IS MEASURED

  Dimension

  Key Indicators

  Engineering velocity & quality

  Sprint velocity trends, deployment frequency, change failure rate, mean time to restore (MTTR) — tracked in ADO

  AI platform adoption

  SEA active usage, AI feature adoption rates, client satisfaction scores tied to AI-powered capabilities

  Platform reliability

  Uptime against SLO targets, P1/P2 incident count and MTTR, performance benchmark attainment

  Talent & team health

  Engineering retention rates, internal promotion rates, hiring close rates for senior/staff engineers, engagement scores

  Innovation pipeline

  Number of new AI capabilities shipped per quarter, patents filed, new platform revenue unlocked

  Delivery predictability

  Sprint commitment vs completion, release cadence consistency, scope creep rate per programme

  Unisys is proud to be an equal opportunity employer that considers all qualified applicants without regard to age, caste, citizenship, color, disability, family medical history, family status, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, national origin, parental status, pregnancy, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, transgender status, veteran status or any other category protected by law.

  This commitment includes our efforts to provide for all those who seek to express interest in employment the opportunity to participate without barriers. If you are a US job seeker unable to review the job opportunities herein, or cannot otherwise complete your expression of interest, without additional assistance and would like to discuss a request for reasonable accommodation, please contact our Global Recruiting organization at GlobalRecruiting@unisys.com or alternatively Toll Free: 888-560-1782 (Prompt 4). US job seekers can find more information about Unisys’ EEO commitment here.