Tech & Platforms Director – AI Center of Excellence

About the role

The Director, Tech & Platforms leads the AI Center of Excellence, shaping the architecture, platforms, and engineering foundations that enable AI at scale across Zain Group. Reporting to senior technology leadership, this role partners with the Group CTO, IT, Data, Security directors and OpCo AI Office Heads to define strategy, enforce standards, and deliver production‑ready AI solutions.

Key responsibilities

• Define and maintain the Group AI reference architecture for Generative AI, Agentic AI, ML, and intelligent automation.
• Own AI platform strategy, service catalog, and vendor relationships, including LLM platforms, orchestration, MLOps, and data platforms.
• Lead platform evaluation, commercial negotiations, and implementation oversight.
• Establish and enforce technical standards for AI delivery, coding practices, deployment patterns, and monitoring.
• Chair the Group AI Architecture Review Board to ensure alignment across OpCos.
• Enable delivery teams with engineering practices, tooling, accelerators, and problem‑solving support.
• Define AI production operations, SLAs, monitoring, incident management, and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with CTO, IT, Data, and Security directors on integration, infrastructure, and compliance.
• Provide architecture guidance to six OpCo AI Office Heads and build a high‑performing team of architects and engineers.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field; Master’s preferred.
• 15+ years of technology leadership experience, progressing from engineering to architecture to senior management.
• Proven experience building and operating AI/ML platforms at enterprise scale.
• Deep knowledge of AI reference architectures, GenAI, LLMs, and intelligent automation.
• Experience in telecom or other highly regulated industries is a strong advantage.

Required skills

• AI/ML platform architecture
• Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM)
• MLOps and orchestration
• Data platform integration
• Enterprise architecture
• Cloud infrastructure
• Vendor management