Head of AI Product & Architecture Consulting

We’re hiring a Head of AI Product & Architecture Consulting!

Employment Type: Full-Time/Direct Hire

Location: Richmond, VA, Atlanta, GA, Washington, DC, New York City & Charlotte, NC Metro Areas

Location Type: Hybrid - 1-2 days onsite per week - Home Office/Local Ippon office 

About Ippon:

The Ippon story started in 2002 in Paris, France - cue in the accordion. Our founder and CEO Stéphane Nomis used his unique experience as an international Judo champion to create a culture based on the sports values of ambition and excellence. Our USA Headquarters office is located in Richmond, VA, with additional offices in New York, NY,  Washington DC, Charlotte NC, and Atlanta, GA. We are a technology consulting firm that specializes in helping accelerate our client’s digital roadmap in the areas of AI, Product Management, Cloud, DevOps, Data, and Software Engineering. We are proud to be a Premier Snowflake Partner,an Advanced AWS Partner, and a Select Anthropic Partner. Ippon stands out through its financial services industry expertise, technical excellence, and a distinctive coaching mindset.

About the position:

Ippon is seeking a Head of Practice for AI Product & Architecture (APA) to lead and advance the continued evolution of our product and software engineering practice into an AI-native product engineering organization.  The Practice Head will lead Ippon's APA practice, combining deep expertise in software development, product engineering, agile delivery, architecture, and applied AI. This role is responsible for growing a high-performing consulting team, shaping the practice's methods and offerings, and ensuring delivery excellence across complex client engagements.  

The ideal candidate combines proven engineering and consulting leadership with a passion for and practical AI experience and a commitment to software craft.  Working with the CTO and leadership team, they will advance Ippon’s consulting toward broader ownership of customer problems, including Forward Deployed Engineering, building on APA’s engineering heritage and strong partnership with the cloud and data teams.

Roles and Responsibilities:

Practice Leadership & Team Development

• Lead and grow the practice, including its people, skill mix, offerings, delivery standards, and market positioning. Set priorities for recruiting, utilization, and commercial performance with the leadership team.

• Recruit, develop, and retain consultants, engineers, architects, product leaders, and delivery practitioners who combine technical depth with product thinking, customer empathy, clear communication, and comfort with ambiguity.

• Build a pipeline of technical leaders capable of independently leading complex, ambiguous customer engagements.

• Create an environment in which engineers can experiment and move quickly while remaining accountable for quality and outcomes.

• Build a culture grounded in software craft, product thinking, architectural discipline, and practical AI adoption, with an emphasis on psychological safety, accountability, and measurable improvement.

• Define AI engineering development paths through training, mentoring, and hands-on learning. Grow senior engineers and architects who can independently lead complex engagements.

• Continuously improve consulting methods, AI Skills, delivery playbooks, and technical standards with Customer Success and Senior Leadership.

Delivery Excellence

• Provide senior oversight across engagements in software and product engineering, AI-enabled delivery, modernization, and architecture. Ensure solutions are maintainable, secure, scalable, and aligned to client outcomes.

• Champion modern engineering practices, including Domain-Driven Design, Event Storming, API design, event-driven and microservice architectures where appropriate, automated testing, DevOps, continuous delivery, and observability. Drive improvement using DORA, flow, and business-outcome metrics.

• Coach cross-functional client teams across product, engineering, architecture, security, and compliance toward sustainable delivery models that balance speed, governance, quality, and business value.

• With Ippon’s Intelligent Data & Cloud team, define how application teams use shared capabilities for deployment, security, observability, and operations.

AI Leadership

• With the CTO, shape APA’s internal and external approach to applied AI across product engineering, software development, architecture, and delivery transformation. Separate durable capabilities from short-lived trends.

• Help clients identify and pursue practical AI use cases that improve delivery speed, product quality, customer experience, or operational efficiency.

• Build team capability in LLM applications, agentic systems, RAG, tool integration, evaluation, observability, and human-in-the-loop design. Engineer for AI failure modes, security, privacy, reliability, and client governance.

• Establish repeatable patterns for moving AI prototypes into production and applying AI across the SDLC, with testing, evaluation, monitoring, and human review.

Platform & Partner Strategy

• Evaluate partner technologies that improve delivery or meet sustained client demand. Working with Ippon’s data and cloud leaders, optimize how selected partners such as Anthropic, AWS, and Snowflake are used in delivery and offerings.

Client & Thought Leadership

• Support sales pursuits, proposals, and executive conversations. Act as a trusted advisor to senior stakeholders, translating ambiguous needs into clear engagement strategies, delivery plans, and measurable outcomes.

• Define and package APA offerings across AI-enabled product engineering, software modernization, delivery effectiveness, and engineering excellence.

• Build brand awareness through events, speaking engagements, blogs, white papers, and client success stories.

Competencies we are looking for:

Minimum Qualifications:

• 5+ years of consulting experience

• 5+ years of experience building, managing, coaching, and growing high-performing technical teams.

• 5+ years of experience with product development and product-oriented ways of working.

• 7+ years of experience and deep understanding of modern software development practices, including software architecture, software craft, DevOps, CI/CD, testing strategies, and cloud-native delivery.

• Strong working knowledge of agile delivery practices, with the judgment to adapt methods to fit client context rather than applying process mechanically.

• Practical, hands-on experience engineering LLM-enabled applications or agentic systems, including evaluation and production considerations, and using AI-assisted development with appropriate engineering controls.

• Ability to explain AI capabilities and failure modes credibly, and collaborate across application, platform, cloud, data, and security disciplines.

• 7+ years of experience in financial services, banking, insurance, capital markets, or related regulated industries

• Excellent organizational skills, including the ability to manage people, priorities, offerings, delivery quality, and practice operations simultaneously.

• Strong client-facing communication skills, including the ability to engage credibly with executives, product leaders, engineering leaders, architects, and delivery teams.

• Experience supporting business development, proposal creation, solution design, or account growth in a consulting environment.

• Ability to travel up to 20% of the time

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field

• Experience leading a consulting practice, capability, center of excellence, or large technology delivery organization.

• Experience using DORA metrics, SPACE, flow metrics, or other engineering effectiveness frameworks to improve delivery performance.

• Experience developing engineering training, technical career paths, mentoring programs, or communities of practice that build practical AI capability.

• Familiarity with AWS, Snowflake, Anthropic, modern data platforms, and cloud-native architecture.

• Experience with modernization programs, legacy system transformation, platform engineering, or large-scale digital product delivery.

• Experience creating market-facing offerings, white papers, executive presentations, workshops, and assessment frameworks.

• Understanding of regulatory requirements and compliance standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, NIST, ISO) impacting AI and software within the Financial Services and Insurance industries.

• Knowledge of IT strategy and management

• Demonstrated experience of presenting talks at conferences, publishing white papers, and public speaking.

What we offer:

• Competitive salary –   Great starting salaries for well qualified candidates

• Generous Paid Time Off policy - Ippon offers flexible time off to help you be your best

• Health, dental, and vision insurance – We are dedicated to helping our employees live healthier lives through comprehensive health programs

• 401k with company match - Ippon offers an industry leading 401(k) matching plan 

• Family Leave - We support the importance of family and offer maternity, paternity and family medical leave plans   

• The chance to work in a startup-esque environment with a fun, smart, and healthy work environment, focused on our values, teamwork, and 5406 custom Slack emojis

We value the diversity and different perspectives each of our employees bring to Ippon Technologies.

Ippon Technologies is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, veteran, or disability status.

Visit us on LinkedIn or at https://ipponusa.com/ to learn more.

So, do YOU speak Ippon?