Director, AI Engineering & Platform

About Deluxe

Deluxe is a leading global service provider in the media and entertainment sector, catering to content creators and distributors such as Netflix, WarnerMedia, Disney, Amazon, Apple, Viacom, NBCU, Google, AT&T, among others. The company offers solutions in Global Content Distribution, Localization, Accessibility, and Mastering, supporting innovation with significant scale and responsiveness across streaming, theatrical, broadcast, and mobile platforms. Deluxe's headquarters are in Los Angeles with over 3,500 skilled professionals worldwide.

Position Overview

Deluxe is establishing a new AI Engineering & Platform team in Aachen, Germany. The Director will spearhead efforts in developing, managing, and advancing the technical infrastructure for AI production services. This leadership role involves hands-on involvement in building a high-performing engineering team, overseeing complex AI platforms, and steering technical strategy in cloud infrastructure, model deployment, AI services, workflows, and daily operations. The Director will lead a hybrid team primarily based in Aachen and coordinate with remote engineers globally, including the US.

Key Responsibilities

• Recruit, mentor, and oversee a geographically distributed AI engineering team spanning multiple locations.
• Lead end-to-end technical delivery for AI platforms, model serving, automation of workflows, and practical AI engineering projects.
• Define and enforce engineering standards, operational procedures, delivery frameworks, documentation norms, and review mechanisms.
• Collaborate closely with stakeholders across engineering, product management, operations, localization, media workflows, and executive leadership in both the US and Europe.
• Design and manage scalable AI service architectures, including inference and training environments, deployment workflows, observability, and production support.
• Oversee teams managing cloud infrastructure, DevOps, AI platform operations, applied AI engineering, and integration of AI models.
• Continuously assess commercial and open-source AI technologies, including models, frameworks, orchestration systems, and vendor offerings.
• Provide strategic advice regarding in-house development, purchasing, partnering, or integration with third-party AI capabilities to optimize performance, cost, and differentiation.
• Guarantee that AI systems are secure, dependable, maintainable, cost-efficient, and aligned with operational needs.
• Drive improvements in AI engineering workflows, including automation, continuous integration and delivery, monitoring, quality assurance, testing, and release processes.
• Promote AI adoption across Deluxe platforms and workflows through reusable APIs, services, platforms, and consistent technical designs.
• Clarify priorities, risks, technical compromises, project timelines, and resource allocation.
• Ensure independent operational capability of production AI systems through thorough documentation, runbooks, monitoring practices, incident handling, and knowledge dissemination.

Qualifications

• Extensive leadership experience managing engineering teams responsible for cloud platforms, AI/ML systems, data platforms, workflow automation, or production software.
• Proven track record in building and coordinating distributed teams across various locations and time zones.
• Strong expertise in cloud architecture, software and platform engineering, DevOps, or AI/ML engineering fields.
• Experience delivering robust production systems with strict requirements for reliability, monitoring, automation, security, and operational control.
• Deep understanding of contemporary AI architectures, model serving, APIs, data pipeline construction, and practical AI integration strategies.
• Capability to assess technical alternatives, provide practical recommendations, and communicate complex trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Familiarity with cloud services, primarily AWS.
• Experienced in managing complex technical programs from their inception through deployment and ongoing maintenance.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Ability to effectively collaborate with US leadership while independently managing activities from Germany.

Preferred Experience

• Background in AI/ML platforms, MLOps, model deployment, inference systems, or production machine learning operations.
• Experience with agentic workflows, large language model orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or AI-driven automation platforms.
• Familiarity with media-focused technologies such as speech recognition, natural language processing, localization, dubbing, automated speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT), text-to-speech (TTS), or content processing workflows.
• Hands-on experience evaluating commercial and open-source AI models and vendor platforms.
• Knowledge of GPU infrastructure, distributed training, job scheduling systems like Slurm/HPC, containerization (Kubernetes, Docker), infrastructure as code (Terraform), or similar technologies.
• Experience working within the media, entertainment, localization, post-production, or content supply chain industries.