Director, AIT Acceleration Lead, Principal Engineer

1. Role Summary The Director, AIT Acceleration Lead runs Forward Deployment Engineering (FDE) and AI engineering as one acceleration engine, working with AI Product Owners to move high-value ideas from opportunity framing to validated minimum viable products. The role turns prioritized AI demand into working, evaluated solutions at speed, then hands them to Digital & Technology (D&T) and PIC for production, scale and sustainable ownership. The Acceleration Lead owns the rapid-validation and AI engineering capability within AITO, setting engineering and validation standards and leading a multidisciplinary engineering squad that works in PO-led PODs to prove feasibility, desirability and value before scale decisions. The FDE squad focuses on 0→1 business validation of flagship AI opportunities, rapid solution build, small language model development and the AI layer of the AI Empowered Consumption Layer (AICL). 2. Key Accountabilities • Lead FDE and AI engineering as a single acceleration engine, moving prioritized AI portfolio ideas from opportunity framing through rapid prototype, proof of concept and validated MVP. • Partner with AI Product Owners, who report to the AITO Head, on product vision, scope, backlog and MVP success criteria; own technical feasibility, solution build, evaluation evidence and scale-readiness for the prioritized AI portfolio. • Work with AI Product Owners in PO-led PODs, providing FDE and engineering capacity per product and applying shared discovery, engineering and validation standards. • Lead the AIT FDE squad for fast, hands-on solution design, prototyping and validation of flagship AI opportunities (0→1). • Lead rapid AI solution development and implementation through the AI engineering team: agentic applications, RAG pipelines and system integrations built on the China AI platform, using its reference architectures and guardrails. • Own small language model (SLM) and domain model development for priority commercial use cases – data preparation, fine-tuning, distillation and evaluation of open-weight models – deployed through the China LLM foundation and production release gate owned by the AI Platform & Foundation Director. • Own the AI layer of AICL (agents, retrieval and orchestration), delivered as one POD with the D&T Data line (CL layer) and GCA DSM (business definitions and unified KPIs). • Drive builder adoption with China business teams and engineers through sample agents, reusable components, documentation, training and an active user community, in step with GTMx AI fluency and enablement programs. • Apply disciplined validation gates - feasibility, desirability and value - so only evidenced solutions progress to scale. • Manage the acceleration-to-scale seam with D&T and PIC, ensuring validated solutions have clear ownership, production architecture, evaluation evidence, funding and transition plans. • Partner with the AIT Value & Performance Lead to connect product decisions to business cases, KPIs and model-cost economics. • Lead and develop a multidisciplinary engineering squad, balancing speed, quality and reuse. 3. Required Capabilities & Competencies (a) Critical Capabilities & Qualifications • Strong AI product sense and proven partnership with product owners: discovery-to-MVP practices, value-based prioritization and translating business problems into technical solutions. • Forward deployment / applied AI engineering: agentic applications, retrieval, model and API integration, orchestration, prompt and context engineering, evaluation, guardrails and human-in-the-loop design. • Hands-on experience building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines – embeddings, re-rankers and vector databases – and writing production-quality Python. • Small language model and do