Agentic AI Solutions Director

Vaco is actively seeking an Agentic AI Solutions Director for a direct-hire role supporting a nationally respected, technically focused, and rapidly growing organization in St. Louis.

The senior level AI leader will define and operationalize enterprise AI strategy within a highly regulated environment. This role blends architectural vision, agentic design, AI tool delivery, and effective business alignment.

The Director will design and oversee the development of AI enabled solutions across an enterprise environment primarily built on AWS, though Azure and Microsoft Copilot are also utilized. This role will ensure scalable, compliant, and secure deployment of generative AI and agentic systems that drive measurable business value across the enterprise.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute the enterprise roadmap for generative AI, agentic systems, and intelligent automation by designing scalable reference architectures across AWS dominant environments with hybrid Azure capabilities.
• Establish guardrails for LLM usage, RAG, orchestration, and workflow automation, and driving disciplined build versus buy decisions across Bedrock, Copilot, SaaS AI, and custom pipelines.
• Lead the design and oversight of autonomous and semi autonomous AI agents integrated with enterprise data, APIs, and workflows, establishing standards for prompt engineering, orchestration, memory management, evaluation, monitoring, and continuous feedback to ensure performance, reliability, and controlled risk.
• Embed governance frameworks suitable for highly regulated environments by ensuring model risk management, auditability, explainability, data lineage, access controls, governance, data leakage prevention, and AI output validation in partnership with Legal, Risk, and Compliance.
• Oversee AI platform capabilities across AWS and Azure ecosystems by standardizing testing, benchmarking, observability, cost governance, and secure integration with enterprise data platforms and core systems.
• Support cross functional AI initiatives across engineering, product, data, and business teams by translating strategic opportunities into scalable solutions, mentoring technical resources, and advising executives on AI investment prioritization, value realization, and long term capabilities.

Required Qualifications

• 10 years of progressive enterprise technology leadership experience including at least 2 years architecting cloud solutions with demonstrated oversight of generative AI and LLM based systems in production settings.
• Previous experience operating within regulated environments with a deep understanding of compliance driven architecture, model lifecycle management, foundation models, retrieval augmented generation, agent orchestration patterns, secure enterprise integration, and data governance and privacy controls.
• Expertise in hybrid cloud strategy spanning AWS and Azure including governance of Copilot and enterprise AI enablement initiatives coupled with working knowledge of AI risk management frameworks, observability, cost modeling, performance benchmarking, and executive level communication aligned to strategic investment decisions.

Additional Details

• Employment Type: Direct-Hire with Client
• Primary Schedule: Monday - Friday / 8a - 5p (CST)
• Location: Fully Onsite - St. Louis
• Target Total Compensation: $190k - $250k
• Travel: Up to 20%
• Engagement Status: Applicant must be currently authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for employment-based sponsorship, now or in the future, including: H-1B, L-1, TN, O-1, E-3, H-1B1, F-1, J-1, OPT, CPT, or any other employment-based visa programs.

Interested Candidates are Encouraged to Apply for Immediate Consideration!

Determining compensation for this role (and others) at Vaco/Highspring depends upon a wide array of factors including but not limited to the individual's skill sets, experience and training, licensure and certifications, office location and other geographic considerations, as well as other business and organizational needs. With that said, as required by local law in geographies that require salary range disclosure, Vaco/Highspring notes the salary range for the role is noted in this job posting. The individual may also be eligible for discretionary bonuses, and can participate in medical, dental, and vision benefits as well as the company's 401(k) retirement plan. Additional disclaimer: Unless otherwise noted in the job description, the position Vaco/Highspring is filing for is occupied. Please note, however, that Vaco/Highspring is regularly asked to provide talent to other organizations. By submitting to this position, you are agreeing to be included in our talent pool for future hiring for similarly qualified positions. Submissions to this position are subject to the use of AI to perform preliminary candidate screenings, focused on ensuring minimum job requirements noted in the position are satisfied. Further assessment of candidates beyond this initial phase within Vaco/Highspring will be otherwise assessed by recruiters and hiring managers. Vaco/Highspring does not have knowledge of the tools used by its clients in making final hiring decisions and cannot opine on their use of AI products.

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