Director, AI Solutions & Strategic Advisory (APAC)

Role Overview: We are seeking for our position of Director, AI Solutions & Strategic Advisory (APAC) a seasoned AI executive to lead our Solution Architecture and Applied AI practice across the Asia-Pacific region. This is a hybrid leadership role requiring a unique combination of deep technical hands-on expertise (coding, architecture), commercial strategy (P&L management, pre-sales), and specific domain knowledge in highly regulated industries (Insurance, Finance, and Government).

The ideal candidate will bridge the gap between frontier model research and operational enterprise deployment, specifically focusing on Sovereign AI and air-gapped environments.

Key Responsibilities:

• Regional Leadership & P&L Management:

• Scale and manage the regional Applied AI and Solutions Engineering teams from early-stage growth to maturity (experience scaling teams from 5 to 15+ headcounts required).

  Oversee the Professional Services P&L, driving service upselling and maintaining profit margins for a multi-million dollar ARR customer base.

  Define the go-to-market technical strategy for Enterprise and Government sectors.

• Sovereign & Generative AI Deployment:

• Lead the architecture and deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in secure, sovereign, and air-gapped environments (e.g., on-premise, private cloud).

  Design and implement RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines and agentic workflows using open-weight models.

  Advise C-level stakeholders and government agencies on AI Safety, Responsible AI, and Model Governance.

• Predictive AI & Complex Modeling:

• Oversee the development of high-stakes predictive models for the Financial Services and Insurance sectors (e.g., M&A prediction, Actuarial pricing, Claims optimization).

  Ensure model interpretability and regulatory compliance for banking and insurance clients.

• Technical Prototyping & Last Mile Engineering:

• Build full-stack Proof of Concepts (POCs) to demonstrate business value, utilizing both backend (Python, Flask) and frontend (React, Streamlit) technologies.

  Lead code-integration initiatives (e.g., VSCode extensions for AI coding assistants).

Mandatory Requirements:

1. Education & Academic Background:

• Master's Degree is mandatory. Preference for a dual-degree background in Engineering/Mathematics and Financial Engineering/Econometrics from top-tier global institutions.

• Strong academic foundation in Statistical Signal Processing, Stochastic Calculus, and Machine Learning.

2. Professional Experience:

• Minimum of 10 years of professional experience in Data Science, AI Consulting, and Technical Leadership.

• Proven track record of working within both a global insurance/financial institution (on the client side) and a hyper-growth Enterprise AI software vendor (on the vendor side).

• Experience scaling a technical regional team from scratch (founding member capacity) to a fully operational business unit across multiple Asian markets.

3. Specialized Technical Skills:

• Expertise in both Classical Machine Learning (XGBoost, Scikit-learn, GLMs) and Generative AI (Transformers, Peft, LoRA, vLLM).

• Demonstrated experience with Actuarial Data Science: Specifically in Life Insurance pricing, P&C pricing, or Claims optimization.

• Proficiency in Full-Stack Prototyping: Python, R, SQL, plus web frameworks (React, Flask) and vector databases (Elasticsearch/MongoDB).

• Hands-on experience with Sovereign AI architecture: Deploying models on localized infrastructure (GovTech/Defense context) rather than purely public APIs.

4. Strategic & Commercial Achievements:

• Proven history of managing a regional Pre-sales and Post-sales function with a track record of driving revenue growth (e.g., influencing $15M+ ARR).

• Experience acting as a trusted advisor to government bodies or regulatory agencies regarding AI safety and security standards.

• Must be a recognized community leader (e.g., Board member of tech associations, organizer of large-scale ML meetups, or frequent keynote speaker at regional AI conferences).