A US bank is seeking a Director, AI and Analytics to serve as a collaborative and technical partner across the enterprise.
Location: Austin, TX
The Director, AI and Analytics will lead, architect, and deliver the organization’s portfolio of strategic, operational, and transformational AI solutions, impacting data usage, AI adoption, and predictive analytics across the enterprise. This role is a player coach leadership position that requires a rare combination of business influence and deep technical proficiency. This leader will partner across the organization to deliver innovative and data driven solutions and to turn customer insights into competitive advantages. This position is an exempt role, reports to the VP, Data and AI, and leads the AI and Analytics team.
About the Organization
A US bank was founded in 1936 and has grown to serve members throughout Texas and beyond. The organization is dedicated to empowering its members to achieve financial success and build brighter futures, guided by values centered on member obsession, reimagined possibilities, and performance excellence rooted in integrity.
Essential Functions
Data and Analytics Portfolio Execution: Lead the end to end delivery of AI use cases, from next best conversation models to operational efficiency engines, ensuring they move beyond lab experiments into resilient production environments.
Technical Sovereignty: Define the technical standards for AI delivery, influencing IT and Data Engineering teams on the evolution of the Databricks platform, Unity Catalog, and feature store requirements to ensure they meet the needs of modern data science.
Multi Disciplinary Leadership: Manage and mentor teams across data science, machine learning engineering, and operational business analytics, fostering a culture of delivery over perfection.
Strategic Partnership: Serve as the primary translator between executive business goals and technical execution, ensuring the AI roadmap is prioritized based on business value and ROI. Partner with enterprise business functions to manage operational, strategic, and transformational AI solutions.
Production Excellence: Establish CI/CD, MLOps, and monitoring standards for models within the Databricks environment to ensure long term stability and accuracy. Develop and execute the organization’s AI and analytics strategy in alignment with overall business goals.
Team Leadership and Development
Lead, inspire, motivate, and develop team members by providing guidance and training to attain departmental and individual development goals and support organizational needs. Serve as a role model in transparent communication, two way dialogue, and proactive communication to the team. Build a successful team operating according to the organization’s guiding principles, providing guidance and resources and removing obstacles as needed. Provide team leadership based on servant leadership principles, caring for the whole person. Plan, monitor, and appraise job results with an emphasis on coaching and developing employees to achieve desired performance results. Help teams achieve their career goals, ensuring team members understand how to have an impact and are aware of that impact when they have made it.
Strategic Business Partner
Partner with executive leadership, business units, and technology stakeholders to identify high impact opportunities for AI and analytics, translating business needs into actionable data and technology roadmaps. Cultivate strong, lasting relationships and connections with others, working collaboratively with peers across the organization. Facilitate joint brainstorming and team collaboration, working closely with peers to help create organizational goals and strategies. Collaborate with departments across the business, supporting their needs to achieve desired operational results. Collaborate with business partners to determine future needs and support necessary to achieve business unit strategy.
Strategy Development and Strategic Planning
Collaborate with senior leaders and actively participate in the organizational strategic planning process. Develop AI and Analytics strategies in partnership with executive leadership to drive achievement of organizational and department goals. Monitor and evaluate department progress toward stated goals and make adjustments as needed based on business and department needs. Facilitate procurement of tools and resources necessary to achieve organizational and department strategic priorities.
Budgetary Oversight and Expense Management
Establish the AI and Analytics annual budget with identification of planned expenses for new or enhanced programs and services. Ensure effective control of results and take action to guarantee achievement of departmental objectives within designated budgets. Monitor expenses on a monthly basis to evaluate versus budget and make adjustments as needed based on organizational and department priorities. Collaborate with senior leaders on development of the organizational annual budget in alignment with strategic objectives.
Other
Perform other duties as assigned. Adhere to all organizational policies, procedures, and business ethics codes. Complete required regulatory training as assigned. Maintain strict adherence and compliance to all laws, rules, regulations, policies, procedures, and internal controls specific to the role, including but not limited to the Bank Secrecy Act, Anti Money Laundering, USA Patriot Act, OFAC, and Fair Lending regulations.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
Team Building and Leadership: Proven ability to create a high performance climate through talent identification, recruitment, and retention. Strong and demonstrable leadership skills with the ability to inspire and motivate others. Proven ability to build a team of diverse talents that complement one another. Proven ability to hold oneself to the highest standard of integrity and personal behavior.
Building Relationships and Using Influence: Exceptional interpersonal skills with the proven ability to influence senior level management and key stakeholders. Strong ability to recognize nuances in others and leverage this understanding for a more influential impact on the team. Effective communicator, listener, and presenter, with the ability to work with various levels of the organization. Adept at maintaining effective relationships with internal departments, external business and community partners, and other key stakeholders.
Executing for Results: Possess a proven delivery track record and exceptional service orientation. Adept at translating the mission of the organization into actionable, quantitative plans. Possess high levels of energy and persistence. Rigorously hold oneself and others accountable for achieving high levels of individual and organizational performance.
Business Acumen: Seasoned technology and people leader with experience managing multi disciplinary teams (data science, MLE, and analytics) to bring complex products to production. Deep, hands on experience with the Databricks ecosystem. Expert knowledge of translating business goals to analytic objectives and demonstrated creative problem solving ability. Exceptional collaborative communication skills, including written, verbal, interpersonal, and active listening. Consistently able to evaluate decisions in terms of impact to the business. Ability to articulate ideas to both technical and non technical audiences. Combination of technical knowledge, business acumen, and organizational leadership skills.
Technical Skills
Databricks Mastery: Extensive experience leading teams within the Databricks Lakehouse architecture. Deep familiarity with Spark (PySpark), Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, and MLflow.
AI/ML Lifecycle: Deep understanding of the full ML lifecycle, including data engineering and wrangling, feature engineering, model training, deployment (real time and batch), and model drift monitoring. Proven ability to influence IT and Platform Engineering teams on infrastructure needs, such as cluster management, workspace security, and environment automation.
Modern Tech Stack: Proficiency in Python, SQL, and Git. Experience with automated testing, containerization, and orchestration tools in a cloud environment (Azure/AWS).
Core Competencies
Delivering Member Obsession: Seeks to understand customers, identifies customer service issues, drives member focused practices, assures member satisfaction.
Delivering Performance Excellence: Maintains focus, measures progress and outcome, ensures accountability.
Delivering Innovation: Inspires curiosity, challenges current thinking, supports experimentation, advances ideas to the next stage.
Delivering Empowered Leadership: Develops direction, builds team trust, identifies opportunities to share responsibility, informs the team, supports the team.
Experience
Minimum Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, with a major in Data Science, Econometrics, Computer Science, Operations Research, or a relevant field, or equivalent experience. Minimum of ten (10) years of related experience in Data Science, AI and Analytics. Minimum of seven (7) years of management and supervisory leadership experience developing and leading teams with direct reporting relationships. Extensive experience in modern data science platforms, Databricks preferred. Must be bondable.
Preferred Requirements: Master’s degree in Data Science, Econometrics, Computer Science, or Operations Research. Minimum of five (5) years of demonstrated strategic leadership experience. Experience working in a credit union or financial services industry. Experience managing multiple teams across AI, data science, and analytics delivery. Certifications such as Databricks Machine Learning Professional or Databricks Data Engineer Professional, Cloud Architect certification (Azure/AWS/GCP), or equivalent.
Physical Demands
The physical demands described are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. The employee is regularly required to sit, use hands to finger, handle, or feel, reach with hands and arms, and talk or hear. Specific vision abilities required include close vision, distance vision, peripheral vision, and the ability to adjust focus. The role involves extensive use of the telephone and virtual communications requiring the ability to explain complex information effectively and accurately.
Work Environment
The work environment characteristics described are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. This position frequently requires on site presence in Austin, Texas. This position may occasionally involve periodic stressful situations, an adjusted work schedule, overtime, evening or weekend work, and public contact requiring appropriate professional appearance. The role involves frequent computer use at a workstation for multiple hours at a time.
A US bank is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including Protected Veterans and Individuals with Disabilities. This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws.
Compensation: DOE