AVP, AI/ML Ops

AVP, AI/ML Ops

The Role at a Glance

We are creating a new AI/ML Ops pillar to own the reliability, safety, and cost-effectiveness of every model, pipeline, and agent we run in production. This is fundamentally an operations leadership role: someone who has built monitoring, escalation, and change management discipline from the ground up during a technology or business transformation, and who can apply that same rigor to AI/ML systems. This leader will build and run the function that closes the gap between "built" and "running well at scale." They will report to the Chief Data & AI Engineering Officer and sit alongside the leaders of AI/Data Infrastructure, Data Strategy & Governance, Data & Delivery Platform, AI/ML/Agentic Engineering, and AI Native Intelligence Platform.

What you'll be doing

Operating Foundation & Change Management

• Define the operating model for how AI/ML systems move from build to production: intake, change approval, release governance.
• Build change management processes for model, pipeline, and agent releases, including change advisory review, risk tiering, rollback authority, and communication protocols.
• Establish a clear ownership and accountability model (RACI) across Engineering, Ops, and Governance for every production AI/ML asset.

Monitoring, Observability & Notifications

• Build monitoring for performance, drift, latency, quality, and safety across production AI/ML systems.
• Design the notification and alerting architecture: what gets flagged, to whom, at what severity, with what SLA for acknowledgment.
• Implement in-production evals and guardrails; enforce governance policy at runtime in partnership with Data Strategy & Governance.

Incident Response & Escalation Management

• Define and own SLOs/SLAs for production models, pipelines, and agents.
• Build on-call rotations, incident response, escalation tiers, and postmortem practice for AI/ML systems.
• Own the detection and escalation path for misuse, abuse, or safety incidents.
• Drive mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-recovery down as the estate scales.

Deployment & Lifecycle Governance

• Partner with Platform Engineering to stand up CI/CD, versioning, and rollback for models, pipelines, and agents, partnering with Engineering on execution.
• Establish safe rollout patterns (canary, shadow, staged) in partnership with Engineering.
• Own the retirement and deprecation process for models and agents no longer in use.

Cost & Capacity

• Own inference and compute cost visibility and optimization; build unit economics per model and agent.
• Partner with AI/Data Infrastructure on capacity planning. Organization Building
• Define the operating model, team structure, and hiring plan for the pillar.
• Build the feedback loop that routes production failure modes and cost signals back to Engineering.
• Establish the pillar's KPIs and report on them to the Chief Data & AI Engineering Officer and broader leadership.

What we’re looking for

• Proven track record leading operations through a major transformation: building the operating model, monitoring and observability foundation, and escalation discipline for a function that didn't have one before, ideally in technology, platform, or shared-services operations.
• Deep experience in change management: standing up change advisory processes, risk tiering, release governance, and rollback authority in a fast-moving technical environment.
• Strong background in monitoring, observability, and notification and escalation design: knowing what to alert on, who gets paged, and how severity and ownership are defined.
• Experience building incident response and postmortem practices, including on-call rotations and MTTD/MTTR reduction, in any production technology environment. AI/ML-specific experience is a strong plus, not a prerequisite.
• Working knowledge of (or demonstrated ability to quickly learn) ML/LLM system failure modes: drift, degradation, hallucination, latency and cost blowups, and how to instrument against them.
• Experience partnering with governance and risk functions to enforce policy in live systems.
• Strong track record hiring, developing, and leading technical or operational teams, ideally from an early stage.
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity and building process from scratch, not just running an existing playbook.

What’s it like to work here?

At Lincoln Financial, we love what we do. We make meaningful contributions each and every day to empower our customers to take charge of their lives. Working alongside dedicated and talented colleagues, we build fulfilling careers and stronger communities through a company that values our unique perspectives, insights and contributions and invests in programs that empower each of us to take charge of our own future.

What’s in it for you:

• Clearly defined career tracks and job levels, along with associated behaviors for each of Lincoln's core values and leadership attributes

• Leadership development and virtual training opportunities

• PTO/parental leave

• Competitive 401K and employee benefits

• Free financial counseling, health coaching and employee assistance program

• Tuition assistance program

• Work arrangements that work for you

• Effective productivity/technology tools and training

The pay range for this position is with anticipated pay for new hires between the minimum and midpoint of the range and could vary above and below the listed range as permitted by applicable law. Pay is based on non-discriminatory factors including but not limited to work experience, education, location, licensure requirements, proficiency and qualifications required for the role. The base pay is just one component of Lincoln’s total rewards package for employees. In addition, the role may be eligible for the Annual Incentive Program, which is discretionary and based on the performance of the company, business unit and individual. Other rewards may include long-term incentives, sales incentives and Lincoln’s standard benefits package.

About The Company

Lincoln Financial helps people to confidently plan for their version of a successful future. We focus on identifying a clear path to financial security, with products