AI Principal Technical Consultant, AI Services at Thinkahead

Job description

AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation. At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD. We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived. We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD. AHEAD is seeking a Principal Technical Consultant, AI Services to lead the architecture, engineering, and deployment of enterprise-grade AI solutions for our clients. This is a senior hands-on technical leadership role for someone who can turn ambiguous business problems into scalable, secure, production-ready AI systems. You will work directly with client technology and business leaders to define solution architecture, guide engineering teams, make technical trade-offs, and ensure that AI initiatives move from prototype to measurable business impact. The ideal candidate combines software engineering depth, applied AI / ML fluency, enterprise architecture judgment, and consulting-style client leadership. You do not need to be a pure research scientist, but you should be credible with engineers, data scientists, architects, platform teams, security stakeholders, and senior executives. This role is well suited for candidates with backgrounds in applied AI consulting, ML engineering, AI solution architecture, technical product development, data science engineering, or advanced analytics engineering environments. What You’ll Do 1. Architect and build enterprise AI solutions • Lead the architecture, design, development, and deployment of enterprise-grade AI, GenAI, agentic, automation, and ML-enabled solutions. • Translate ambiguous business and technical requirements into clear solution designs, architecture decisions, implementation plans, and engineering workstreams. • Design and build AI solution patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation, workflow orchestration, agent-assisted processes, model integration, API-based automation, and human-in-the-loop review. • Make practical architecture decisions across models, data pipelines, APIs, orchestration layers, vector stores, enterprise applications, security controls, and deployment environments. • Ensure solutions are scalable, secure, maintainable, observable, and aligned to measurable client outcomes. 2. Lead technical delivery across client engagements • Lead technical workstreams across one or more client engagements, including estimation, planning, design, build, testing, deployment, risk management, and issue resolution. • Serve as the technical authority for project teams, owning solution quality, engineering standards, and technical decision-making. • Partner with client engineering, data, cloud, security, and platform teams to integrate AI solutions into enterprise environments. • Lead technical workshops, architecture sessions, demos, design reviews, and working sessions with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. • Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to senior business and technology leaders. 3. Establish production-grade AI engineering standards • Define and apply strong engineering practices across code quality, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, monitoring, reliability, scalability, security, and maintainability. • Establish practical patterns for LLMOps / MLOps, model integration, prompt and workflow management, evaluation, guardrails, performance monitoring, and respon