Centre of Excellence Lead – AI & Data Full Time

About the Role
We are looking for a hands-on, senior technology leader to establish and run our AI & Data Centre of Excellence (CoE). This is a pivotal role at the intersection of technology strategy, solution architecture, capability building, and delivery enablement. The CoE Lead will be the single point of accountability for the maturity, standards, and commercial impact of our AI & Data practice across the organization.

You will own the technical direction of the CoE while actively partnering with Delivery Managers across multiple client accounts to ensure engagements are architected well, de-risked early, and delivered to a consistently high standard. You will shape how we sell, build, and scale AI and data solutions for our clients.

Key Responsibilities
CoE Strategy & Leadership

• Define and execute the vision, roadmap, and operating model for the AI & Data CoE.
• Establish reusable frameworks, accelerators, reference architectures, and IP to differentiate the firm and reduce time-to-value for clients.
• Build and lead a high-performing team of data engineers, ML engineers, AI/GenAI specialists, data scientists, and architects.
• Stay ahead of the curve on emerging technologies (LLMs, agentic AI, RAG, MLOps, modern data stack, vector databases, governance tooling) and translate them into pragmatic offerings.
• Define hiring bar, competency frameworks, training paths, and certification strategy for the AI & Data community.

Delivery Enablement & Account Support

• Partner with Delivery Managers across accounts as the senior technical authority for AI & Data engagements.
• Review solution designs, conduct architecture reviews, and provide hands-on support during critical phases of delivery (discovery, design, go-lives, escalations).
• Help Delivery Managers with capacity planning, skill matching, technical risk identification, and mitigation.
• Act as an escalation point for complex technical issues and quality concerns on live engagements.

Presales & Solutioning

• Support business development teams with technical solutioning, proposals, RFP responses, estimations, and client pitches.
• Lead technical discovery workshops and translate client problems into commercially viable solutions.
• Build credibility with CXO-level stakeholders as a trusted advisor on AI and data strategy.

Experience Required

• 15+ years IT experience with heavy emphasis in a Data leadership role.
• Relevant & recent Gen AI / Agentic AI experience
• Proven track record of building or scaling a CoE, practice, or horizontal capability.
• Hands-on delivery experience across data engineering, analytics, ML, and modern AI/GenAI engagements.
• Experience working in a client-facing services environment, supporting multiple concurrent accounts and delivery managers.
• Strong presales instincts – can shape deals, defend estimates, and negotiate scope with clients.
• Excellent communicator, able to move fluently between boardroom and engineering room.