Hybrid Director, Data Infrastructure – MLOps/LLMOps

at Kiavi

• Job title: Director, Data Infrastructure – MLOps/LLMOps
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: $207,300 - $310,900 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Airflow, AWS, Kafka, Kubernetes
• Location requirements: Hybrid, United States

About the role

• Director of Engineering leading Data Infrastructure and MLOps at Kiavi. Driving technical strategy and mentoring a high-performing team in a growing fintech company.

Responsibilities

• Lead & Mentor a high-performing, skilled, Data Engineering and MLOps team including engineers, senior technical program manager and other technical staff. You'll be responsible for hiring, coaching, and mentoring, with a strong emphasis on developing the careers of your engineers.
• Foster Team and Career Development: Formalize and champion career growth across the Data Infrastructure and MLOps teams. Ensure every team member has a clear career path and an active development plan.
• Drive Technical Strategy & Vision: You will lead the collaborative development of the technical vision and roadmap for our Data and AI/ML platform. You'll partner closely with senior leaders across Risk, Data Analytics, Data Science, and Product Management to co-define the strategy, ensuring it is context-aware of Kiavi's size, capacity, and product needs to drive organization-wide adoption. You will also serve as an "operational steward" for the data stack, prioritizing core infrastructure and maintainability. Your ultimate goal is to build a scaled, efficient, and well-governed platform founded on reproducibility, explainability, bias elimination, and sustainability for all AI/ML initiatives.
• Platform Architecture & Scalability: Work closely with architecture specialists on the team to ensure Kiavi has a scalable core data platform that meets business needs. Identify and prioritize hidden tech debt in the stack that lowers engineer and stakeholder productivity. See that data is efficiently captured, processed, stored, and made accessible across the organization. Drive evolution of the multi-warehouse ecosystem (Snowflake and Databricks) to provide a reliable, high-performance foundation for analytics, machine learning, and business decision-making.
• Foster Customer-Centricity: Support customer-facing initiatives and internal data-dependent teams with a customer orientation. Communicate the “Why” and make certain the platform and infrastructure are built and managed to directly meet customer and internal stakeholder requirements for speed, reliability, and data quality.
• Execute with Excellence: Lead your team in delivering complex, large scale projects where availability, accuracy and security are critical. This includes hands-on technical design, code reviews, and scalable architecture guidance. You will also oversee the data infrastructure layer that powers analytics and AI, ensuring seamless data movement, orchestration, and integration with core engineering systems.

Requirements

• Proven Data and AI/ML Leadership: You have successfully led a team in building and shipping production Data and MLOps/LLMOps Infrastructure to achieve concrete business goals.
• Scaled Platform Experience: You have experience leading platform teams at a medium-to-large company, demonstrating the ability to transition from scrappy builds to a scaled, mature platform that supports diverse AI/ML use cases across multiple business functions (e.g., Risk, Data Science, Revenue teams).
• Technical Depth: You are a former data or ML engineer and not afraid to "dive deep." You can comfortably lead technical design discussions, review code, and challenge your team on technical trade-offs. You are an active, hands-on technical leader who maintains deep fluency in the platform's architecture and implementation details. You have used industry-leading Data and AI/ML systems such as Databricks, Snowflake, AWS SageMaker, Kubeflow, etc. You are proficient in understanding data pipelines, addressing latency, and communicating best practices for tools such as Airflow, Dagster, etc. You have experience in building highly available systems using Kubernetes, Kafka, etc.
• People Leadership: You are an exceptional people manager who knows how to attract, develop, and retain top talent. You see mentorship and curiosity as important parts of your leadership role, and you regularly seek feedback from your reports and your peers to build trust and become a better leader. You are adept at setting Director-level strategy while maintaining a high degree of accountability for execution, ensuring important tasks and critical decisions within your purview are handled effectively without excessive delegation.
• Execution: You have a track record of delivering complex, large-scale projects in a dynamic, fast-paced business environment.
• Clear Communication: You can clearly articulate a vision, create alignment, and communicate technical and business risks to stakeholders at all levels.
• Experience: You have 10+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 5+ years in a direct people management role.
• B.S. degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent experience).
• No real-estate or mortgage experience is needed, but a hunger to learn our business is!

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance: Kiavi offers free employee-only coverage for medical, dental, and vision plans. Dependents receive a heavily discounted premium, competitively placed in the 90th percentile for cost.
• Health Savings Account (HSA): For those enrolled in a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP), Kiavi provides an annual employer contribution to HSAs: $1,000 for individual coverage and $2,000 for dependents.
• Disability and Life Insurance: Immediate access to short-term and long-term disability insurance, as well as group life and AD&D insurance, with coverage at 1x annual salary.
• Remote Work Policy: Kiavi supports working remotely for day-to-day activities for most roles and occasionally may ask employees to gather in person for key meetings, training, team building etc. For remote workers, Kiavi offers a one-time office setup reimbursement of up to $500 and a monthly $85 stipend for internet and phone expenses. For in-office workers, Kiavi offers employer contributions to commuter benefits account, either for parking or public transportation.
• Flexible Time Off: Employees are empowered to manage their own time off, with no strict limits, as long as it's approved by their manager.
• Paid Leaves: Up to 8 weeks of paid leave for medical or caregiver purposes, and 12 weeks of paid maternity/paternity leave. Short-term disability leave is also available for birthing mothers.
• 401(k) & Company Match: A 401(k) plan managed by Fidelity, with Kiavi matching 100% of contributions up to 3% of compensation or $8,000 (whichever is less). All employer contributions are immediately vested.