Senior Director of AI Product Development & Product Excellence Transformation

Who you are

• 10+ years of professional experience in AI/ML, product development leadership, program management, data architecture, quality/product excellence, or technology transformation roles
• Strong technical fluency in AI/ML and data infrastructure: you can evaluate tools, assess platforms, understand data pipelines, and hold your own in technical discussions with engineers, data scientists, and product teams
• Proven track record leading large-scale transformation or change management initiatives, ideally in product development, R&D, or consumer products environments
• Deep understanding of product development lifecycles in a hardware or consumer electronics context, including stage-gate processes, EV/PV builds, and cross-functional launch execution
• Proven ability to both build (hands-on implementation) and think strategically – not just one or the other
• Strong business acumen: you connect technical capabilities to business outcomes and communicate that connection to non-technical stakeholders
• Exceptional leadership skills: you attract talent, build high-performing teams, and influence without authority across a matrixed organization
• Decisive and action-oriented: you make decisions with imperfect information, move fast, and course-correct without hesitation
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and a high-velocity environment where priorities shift and speed matters more than perfection
• Experience at an AI-native company or within a product organization where AI was core to the development process
• Background bridging technical build teams and business stakeholders, with the ability to translate requirements in both directions
• Experience productionalizing AI prototypes (moving from proof-of-concept to enterprise-grade tools with proper back-end infrastructure)
• Familiarity with quality engineering concepts: FMEAs, DVF, reliability testing, voice-of-consumer analysis, return rate analytics

What the job involves

• Reports to: VP, Chief of Staff to the CEO
• Dotted Line: Chief Product Officer and EVP, Product Excellence
• Direct Reports: AI Transformation Team (AI Fellows)
• This is a high-impact leadership role at the intersection of AI, product development, product quality, and organizational transformation
• You will own the strategy and execution of AI integration across both SharkNinja’s Product Development (PD) and Product Excellence (PE) organizations – spanning the full product lifecycle from category strategy and conception through launch, and extending into consumer insights, product integrity, process quality, and manufacturing engineering
• Today, much of this work relies on PowerPoint-based program management, fragmented data, manual analysis, and institutional knowledge trapped in people’s heads
• You will change that
• You will build the data foundation, deploy AI capabilities, and transform workflows so that SharkNinja develops products faster, smarter, and with higher quality at every stage
• This role carries a dual mandate: drive the current portfolio of AI initiatives to measurable completion, and partner directly with PD and PE leadership to shape what comes next
• You are not here to deliver a fixed list of projects
• You are here to build the AI capability that transforms how these organizations work – today and in the future
• You report directly to the VP, Chief of Staff to the CEO, with a dotted line to both the Chief Product Officer and the EVP of Product Excellence
• Data Foundation & Infrastructure
• Architect and implement a unified data infrastructure across PD and PE, resolving the fragmented, siloed data landscape that is the #1 bottleneck to AI adoption
• Map data assets across both organizations (historical product development data, conception decks, sprint timelines, EV/PV outcomes, test results, FMEAs, lessons learned, consumer feedback, return data, quality metrics) and build the ingestion pipelines that make this data usable by AI systems
• Partner with IT and data engineering to connect PD and PE data infrastructure to the enterprise data architecture (Snowflake, AWS)
• Product Development Transformation
• Define and execute the AI transformation roadmap across the full PD lifecycle, while continuously identifying new AI opportunities with PD leadership as capabilities evolve
• Lead the reimagination of program management infrastructure, replacing manual, PowerPoint-based workflows with AI-powered tooling that enables real-time product status vis…