Assistant Vice President, AI Engineering

Southern New Hampshire University is a team of innovators. World changers. Individuals who believe in progress with purpose. Since 1932, our people-centered strategy has defined us — and helped us grow a team that now serves over 180,000 learners worldwide.

Our mission to transform lives is made possible by talented people who bring diverse industry experience, backgrounds and skills to the university. And today, we're ready to expand our reach. All we need is you.

Make an impact — from near or far

At SNHU, you'll have the option to work remotely in the following states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

We ask that our remote employees have access to a reliable internet connection and a dedicated, properly equipped workspace that is free of distractions. Employees must reside in, and work from, one of the above approved states.

The opportunity

Southern New Hampshire University is looking for an AVP of AI Engineering reporting to the Vice President of AI Engineering. As a senior engineering leader, you will oversee operational execution, technical quality, and delivery reliability across the AI Engineering organization. This is the role accountable for ensuring AI projects move from strategy to stable, maintainable production systems - on time and at quality.

You will combine people leadership, technical depth, and operational thoughtfulness. The AVP drives daily AI engineering execution, makes and guides technical decisions across the organization, and builds the operational practices and team culture that sustain high-quality delivery. This includes setting the standard for AI-augmented engineering - shaping how we adopt AI development tools and evolving our definition of engineering productivity.

You will work remotely from any of our approved states. #LI-Remote

What you'll do:

• You will lead operational delivery across AI Engineering: planning, staffing, execution, and shipment of projects
• You will translate strategy into executable technical plans, milestones, and resourcing models
• You will maintain visibility into project status, risks, dependencies, and delivery health
• You will guide execution practices across teams (planning cadences, estimation, delivery reviews, retrospectives, postmortems)
• You will ensure production readiness, on-call practices, and incident response processes are in place and improving
• You will lead long-term sustainability of AI systems post-launch, including maintenance, monitoring, and ongoing optimization
• You will be senior technical authority for AI Engineering and infrastructure decisions
• You will guide architecture for agentic AI systems, data platforms, evaluation frameworks, and production services - with a focus on scalability, reliability, security, cost efficiency, and observability
• You will establish organizational standards for agent orchestration, memory, and tool use patterns
• You will lead cost governance for LLM-based systems (token economics, model selection tradeoffs)
• You will define evaluation strategy for LLM and agent-based systems, ensuring measurable performance criteria exist before production deployment
• You will partner with Staff and Principal Engineers across SNHU to establish and promote adherence to AI technical standards
• You will directly manage engineering and senior technical leads
• You will coach managers on delivery, performance, and team development
• You will lead staffing, hiring, onboarding and career growth
• You will foster a culture of accountability, psychological safety, and continuous improvement
• You will partner across SNHU teams, including AI Governance, Product, Data Science, Design, IT, and Academic partners to ensure smooth execution
• You will communicate delivery progress, tradeoffs, and constraints to senior leadership
• You will help translate technical realities into applicable decisions for senior leadership
• You will set expectations and create conditions for AI-augmented development across the organization: tooling decisions, workflow patterns, and evolving standards for how the team uses AI development tools

What We're Looking For:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with time in production systems
• 5+ years leading engineering teams through managers or senior technical leads
• Experience overseeing delivery for complex, multi-team technical projects
• Expertise balancing technical depth with people and operational leadership
• Experience in production software systems engineering
• Experience building and operating AI-enabled systems in production environments
• Experience with agentic AI architecture, LLM-based systems, and agent orchestration patterns
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or equivalent), data pipelines, and system reliability
• Experience with evaluation methodologies for LLMs and agentic systems (offline evals, human-in-the-loop, production monitoring)
• Experience with AI development tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar)
• Experience with complex architecture reviews, technical tradeoffs, and debugging when needed
• Experience establishing engineering processes that improve predictability without bureaucracy
• Familiarity with on-call models, incident response, and production operations
• Experience improving engineering quality, delivery speed, and system stability

We believe real innovation comes from inclusion - where different experiences, perspectives and talents are celebrated. So if you're wondering whether SNHU is right for you, take the leap and apply. You might be just the person we're looking for.

Compensation

The annual pay range for this position is $151,612.00 - $242,625.00. Actual offer will be based on skills, qualifications, experience and internal equity, in addition to relevant business considerations. We expect this position to be hired in the following target hiring range $167,532.00 - $226,661.00.

Exceptional benefits (because you're exceptional)

You're the whole package. Your benefits should be, too. As a full-time employee at SNHU, you'll get:

• High-quality, low-deductible medical insurance

• Low to no-cost dental and vision plans

• 5 weeks of paid time off (plus almost a dozen paid holidays)

• Employer-funded retirement

• Free tuition program

• Parental leave

• Mental health and wellbeing resources