Director, Applied Artificial Intelligence

The role

The Director of Applied Artificial Intelligence owns the OPUS Brain. You will lead a team that designs, builds, evaluates, and operates cognitive functions for agentic orchestration.

What you will do

• Define and own the architecture and multi-year roadmap for the OPUS Brain.
• Establish a modular set of cognitive functions for agent roles.
• Evolve OPUS Brain capabilities for governed autonomous execution.
• Make build-versus-buy and model-selection decisions.
• Ensure the OPUS Brain enforces agent profiles, roles, permissions, and rules.
• Make agent reasoning traceable and linked to context and rules.
• Define human-in-the-loop patterns including confidence thresholds and escalation triggers.
• Protect against failure modes like hallucination and permission overreach.
• Build evaluation frameworks for cognitive functions and orchestration.
• Create simulation and scenario-testing environments.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of experience, including 4+ years in machine learning, AI, or data science and 3+ years leading applied AI or ML engineering teams.
• A track record of shipping LLM-based or agentic systems into production for enterprise customers.
• Deep hands-on expertise in agent architectures, including LLM reasoning, planning and task decomposition, tool use, agent memory, retrieval-augmented generation, and multi-agent orchestration.
• Experience designing evaluation methods for agent reasoning, planning, and decision quality.
• Experience building AI systems with identity, role-based access, permissions, guardrails, and full audit trails.
• Strong software engineering foundations, including cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), APIs, event-driven architectures, and distributed systems.
• Ability to explain complex AI concepts to executives, customers, and non-technical operators.
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent experience required.

Nice to have

• PhD a plus
• Background in cognitive architectures, automated planning, symbolic or neuro-symbolic reasoning, or decision theory
• Experience with knowledge graphs, digital twins, optimization, or simulation environments for agent testing
• Domain experience in supply chain, logistics, manufacturing, or life sciences operations
• Familiarity with multienterprise networks, B2B integration, EDI, or supply chain control towers
• Experience in regulated environments such as FDA, EU GMP, or DSCSA compliance
• Published research, patents, or open-source contributions in agentic systems, reasoning, or planning

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits

About the company

TraceLink is the world’s largest Agentic Business Network, enabling life sciences and healthcare companies to build and manage a scalable digital workforce of governed, no-code AI agents. Founded in 2009, it has 5 global offices, over 800 employees and more than 1700 customers in over 60 countries.