Associate Director, AI Engineer

Job title: Associate Director, AI Engineer

We are seeking an Associate Director, AI Engineer to help build the next generation of AI agents at dentsu. This is a senior technical individual contributor role focused on designing and delivering multi-agent systems that transform data intelligence into automated, client-facing workflows. You will partner closely with the VP of AI Agents & Automation, write production code, set engineering patterns, and collaborate with an offshore engineering team to deliver scalable, reliable AI products.

What You'll Do

• Design and build multi-agent systems using LLM orchestration frameworks for client-facing AI products.
• Implement end-to-end AI orchestration use cases for clients, ensuring reliability, maintainability, and high-quality delivery.
• Build agentic wrappers and interfaces around data science models (e.g., MMM, forecasting, incrementality) to support conversational access.
• Configure Genie spaces to enable client data exploration and self-service analytics.
• Develop reusable agent components, prompt templates, and tool-use libraries to accelerate future deployments.
• Evaluate LLM providers based on capability, cost, and latency, and recommend optimal options for each use case.
• Collaborate with the Offshore Director Staff AI Engineer on architecture direction, design patterns, and coding standards.
• Write production-grade Python with appropriate error handling, observability, CI/CD integration, and deployment automation.
• Partner closely with Data Scientists to understand models and create resilient, accurate agent interfaces.
• Contribute to technical documentation, architecture decision records, and operational runbooks.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with strong Python skills.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience working with LLMs (e.g., prompt engineering, RAG, function calling, agent frameworks).
• Experience with at least one agent orchestration framework (LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or similar).
• Strong system design skills, including API architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred) and container orchestration.
• Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, and large-scale RAG systems.
• Strong debugging, performance optimization, and problem-solving skills.
• Effective collaboration skills for partnering with distributed teams across regions and time zones.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Databricks and/or Genie.
• Background in media, advertising, or marketing technology.
• Experience with MLOps, model-serving infrastructure, and production model lifecycle.
• Experience building conversational AI or copilot-style products.
• Open-source contributions related to agentic AI.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: USD 94,000 – 152,662 per year. Placement within the range based on experience, knowledge, skills, and other factors.
• Benefits include: Medical, vision, and dental insurance; Life insurance; Short-term and long-term disability insurance; 401k; Flexible paid time off; At least 15 paid holidays per year; Paid sick and safe leave; Paid parental leave. Dentsu complies with applicable state and local laws regarding employee leave benefits.
• Flexible work policy and hub office locations in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York City with hybrid in-office expectations.