Senior Director of Agentic AI Engineering & Platform Architecture

Let’s be unstoppable together! 

Circana is a leading provider of technology, AI, and data solutions for consumer packaged goods companies, manufacturers, and retailers. Our predictive analytics and Liquid Data® platform help clients measure market share, uncover consumer behavior, and drive growth—powered by six decades of expertise and an expansive, high-quality data set. 

At Circana, we are fueled by our passion for continuous learning and growth, we seek and share feedback freely, and we celebrate victories both big and small in an environment that is flexible and accommodating to our work and personal lives.  We’re a global company dedicated to fostering inclusivity and belonging. We value and celebrate the unique experiences, cultures, and viewpoints that each individual brings. By embracing a wide range of backgrounds, skills, expertise, and beyond, we create a stronger, more innovative environment for our employees, clients, and communities. With us, you can always bring your full self to work.  Join our inclusive, committed team to be a challenger, own outcomes, and stay curious together. Circana is proud to be Certified™ by Great Place To Work®. This prestigious award is based entirely on what current employees say about their experience working at Circana. Learn more at www.circana.com.

What will you be doing?

We are seeking a Head of Agentic AI Engineering & Platform Architecture  to lead the design, development, and scaling of our next-generation Agentic AI onboarding and analytics acceleration platform. This role combines principal-level architecture, hands-on engineering leadership, and client-facing technical ownership.

You will set the multi-year strategy for agentic automation, autonomous AI capabilities, metadata-driven ingestion, supervised learning reinforcement, and large-scale distributed processing. The ideal leader is deeply technical, product-oriented, and passionate about building real, production-grade multi-agent systems, not prototypes.

Success is measured by:

• Faster client onboarding
• Reduction in delivery rework
• Platform adoption across teams
• System reliability, scalability, and performance
• Engineering excellence and velocity

Job Responsibilities

1. Architecture & Platform Leadership

• Serve as the principal architect for Circana’s agentic AI platform, defining system architecture, integration patterns, and technical strategy.
• Lead design of multi-agent orchestration, context management, and distributed onboarding pipeline.
• Own evolution of Context Studio and metadata-driven automation frameworks.
• Ensure scalability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency across AI and data pipelines.
• Build Autonomous Agent Architecture that includes agent memory systems (working, long-term, semantic), self‑evaluation/reflection loops and reasoning‑improvement mechanisms, planning & task decomposition capabilities, multi-agent coordination, guardrails and governance policies.

1. Product & Roadmap Ownership

• Establish and maintain the multi-year platform roadmap, including next-generation automation agents, quality gate pipelines, and insight storytelling components.
• Must be product-oriented: focuses on durable, scalable solutions rather than one-off prototypes; ensures production readiness, user adoption, and alignment with long-term platform strategy.
• Must be product-oriented: focuses on durable, scalable solutions rather than one-off prototypes; ensures production readiness, user adoption, and alignment with long-term platform strategy.
• Partner closely with Product on prioritization, customer validation, UX integration, and cross-team adoption.

1. AI Governance, Security & Operational Controls

• Establish enterprise AI governance controls to ensure agentic systems operate within policy, regulatory, privacy, and data‑minimization boundaries, based on best‑practice governance patterns for agentic AI.
• Implement agent observability (decision logs, audit trails, monitoring dashboards) and behavioral tracking to maintain visibility into agent actions and prevent unintended data or system access. 3
• Integrate AI security measures to protect against misuse, privilege escalation, and unauthorized agent actions.
• Apply AIOps-based monitoring and LLMOps/MLOps operational practices (evaluation, drift monitoring, reproducibility, lifecycle automation) to ensure reliability, safety, and high‑quality outputs across all agent workflows

1. Hands-On Engineering Leadership

• Lead design and build-out of multi-agent automation, Spark-based ingestion, RAG pipelines, context management, and supervised learning reinforcement loops.
• Need to be hands-on building complex platform components, providing direct contributions in Python, Spark, LangChain, orchestration frameworks, and agent toolchains.

1. Client-Facing Technical Leadership

• Serve as the primary AI expert in client onboarding automation, shaping solutions, architectural proposals, and automation strategies.
• Communicate complex design decisions and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Drive adoption during onboarding programs, ensuring measurable improvements in onboarding speed, quality, and rework reduction.
• Support pre-sales discussions, solution architecture reviews, and executive briefings.

1. Team Leadership, Coaching & Organizational Impact

• Build and lead a high-performance engineering team, including US-based technical leaders and offshore engineering teams.
• Mentor engineers in LLM engineering, agent architectures, distributed systems, metadata automation, and LLM/AI operationalization.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Delivery, Analytics, Data Engineering, and Platform Engineering.

Requirements

Experience

• 15+ years in software engineering, AI/ML, data engineering, or distributed systems
• 5+ years in senior/principal/staff engineering, architect, or platform leadership roles.
• 3+ years leading engineering teams.
• Experience operating in client-facing, delivery-oriented, or consulting environments.

Technical Skills

• Expertise with agentic AI frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen
• Deep experience with RAG, tool/function calling, prompt engineering, multi-step reasoning, and context engineering.
• Hands-on experience building autonomous agent capabilities: memory architectures, reflection/self-critique loops, planning/decomposition, multi-agent coordination, and state management.
• Proficiency with Knowledge Graph / GraphDB and vector databases.
• Strong programming skills in Python (production services, performance patterns, concurrency).
• Expertise with Apache Spark for distributed pipelines, onboarding ETL/ELT, schema enforcement, and performance tuning.
• Strong proficiency in SQL, data modeling, metadata design, and analytics/warehouse patterns.
• Experience architecting distributed ingestion and workflow systems (batch + streaming), including robust data quality patterns.
• Experience with LLMOps, MLOps, and AIOps platforms.
• Familiarity with modern front-end frameworks (e.g., React) a plus.

Leadership & Communication

• Exceptional communicator with ability to influence executive, client, and engineering audiences.
• Demonstrated success driving adoption, productization, and operational rigor.
• Must be product-oriented: focuses on durable, scalable solutions rather than one-off prototypes; ensures production readiness, user adoption, and alignment with long-term platform strategy.

Circana Behaviors

As well as the technical skills, experience and attributes that are required for the role, our shared behaviors sit at the core of our organization. Therefore, we always look for people who can continuously champion these behaviors throughout the business within their day-to-day role:

• Stay Curious: Being hungry to learn and grow, always asking the big questions.
• Seek Clarity: Embracing complexity to create clarity and inspire action.
• Own the Outcome: Being accountable for decisions and taking ownership of our choices.
• Center on the Client: Relentlessly adding value for our customers.
• Be a Challenger: Never complacent, always striving for continuous improvement.
• Champion Inclusivity: Fostering trust in relationships engaging with empathy, respect, and integrity.
• Commit to each other: Contributing to making Circana a great place to work for everyone.

Location

This position can be located in the following area(s): Remote 

Prospective candidates may be asked to consent to background checks (in accordance with local legislation and our candidate privacy notice ) Your current employer will not be contacted without your permission.

The below range reflects the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future. An employee’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, seniority, geographic location, performance, shift, travel requirements, sales or revenue-based metrics, any collective bargaining agreements, and business or organizational needs. The salary range for this role is 180,000 to 230,000.

This job is also eligible for bonus pay.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including [paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k)] to eligible employees.

You can apply for this role through methods such as (e.g., Careers website link and/or Intranet site for internal candidates).

The anticipated application deadline for this position is 3-25-26.