Executive Director, AI

Agency:

Hearts & Science

Job Function:

Media

Job Subfunction:

Media Planning and Buying

Job Description:

Role Purpose 
Lead Hearts United’s AI and Automation team and own what we build, why it matters, and how approved opportunities move from technical definition to live solution. Reporting to the Chief Transformation Officer, this role turns AI from potential into measurable value by delivering secure, reliable, and scalable agents, automations, and connected workflows. 

Why This Role Matters 

• Hearts United was built to challenge inertia and put Magnetism in Motion. In a field shaped by platforms, creators, communities, commerce, culture, and AI, our advantage comes from discovering what others overlook, daring to find the original way in, and deciding like it matters.

• We believe media creativity is our advantage, AI should be predictive, and accountability should be measured through outcomes. This leader turns those beliefs into working intelligence that helps ambitious brands move faster, manage complexity, and maintain quality without proportional cost increases.

• Whatever the technology, people work with people. The role must build AI that elevates human judgment, extends expertise, and gives teams more capacity for strategy, creativity, and growth.

The Leadership Mandate 

• Own What We Build and Why: Set the technical portfolio, make build versus reuse decisions, and direct capacity to the highest-value opportunities.

• Lead the Builders: Direct solution architecture, advanced coding, prompt engineering, integrations, testing, deployment, and support.

• Automate, Augment, Productize: Make today’s work faster, change how work gets done, and scale proven solutions when value, demand, and reliability are demonstrated.

• Build for Production: Move beyond prototypes through clear architecture, acceptance criteria, human oversight, QA, documentation, monitoring, and release controls.

Role Overview

This is the senior leader accountable for Hearts United’s AI and automation practice, team, and builds. Operations and Business Strategy own intake, qualification, prioritization, and orchestration. This leader listens in as the technical authority, assessing feasibility, data readiness, effort, risk, and reuse, then takes accountability once an opportunity is approved for build. 

The Chief Transformation Officer owns the broader transformation strategy, operating model, investment, and enterprise tradeoffs. This leader owns technical direction, solution quality, delivery, and day-to-day leadership of the AI and Automation team, partnering with account teams, product, technology, data, operations, legal, and client stakeholders. 

Key Responsibilities 

AI Portfolio, Architecture & Build Leadership 

• Set the technical vision and roadmap for AI agents, automations, and connected intelligent workflows.

• Own decisions on architecture, sequencing, reuse, configuration, net-new build, and productization.

• Lead solution design across agent architecture, prompt systems, orchestration, APIs, data pipelines, authentication, integrations, and output experiences.

• Establish development standards, reusable patterns, shared prompt and component libraries, documentation, and responsible AI controls.

Team Leadership & Delivery Management 

• Lead and develop the multidisciplinary team across AI solutions, solutions engineering, automation engineering, data engineering, QA, deployment, and support.

• Turn approved opportunities into actionable engineering briefs with requirements, acceptance criteria, data readiness, success measures, and named owners.

• Direct onshore, nearshore, and offshore delivery as one team, using structured handoffs, visible backlogs, decision logs, and release evidence.

• Manage capacity against the highest-value work while protecting quality, reliability, scalability, and speed.

Solution Deployment & Oversight

• Lead the delivery lifecycle after approval: define, design, build, validate, deploy, measure, optimize, repeat.

• Own build quality through code review, prompt evaluation, technical and expertise QA, security and access controls, and release decisions.

• Ensure every launch includes the documentation, enablement, monitoring, and support needed to become part of the work.

• Prove contained use cases, establish repeatable delivery, and scale cross-account reuse and production support. …