VP AI - thunders.ai

* **You are a System Thinker:** You naturally model complex systems end-to-end (product, data, models, infrastructure, security, and people). You can decompose ambiguous problems into clear components, define interfaces and ownership, and anticipate second-order effects (cost, latency, reliability, privacy, and maintainability). * Strong ability to reason about trade-offs (build vs buy, accuracy vs latency, batch vs streaming, centralization vs autonomy) and make decisions explicit. * Comfortable designing for scale and robustness: observability-first, failure modes, graceful degradation, and clear SLOs/SLIs. * Systems mindset across the org: align architecture with product strategy, sprint execution, OKRs, and team design; unblock cross-team dependencies with crisp docs and diagrams. * Proven experience building and leading AI engineering teams in agile environments driven by rapid product iteration and research-to-production cycles - ideally customer facing * Deep technical knowledge of agent architecture, autonomous system design, and modern AI platforms. * Strong awareness of leading-edge tools and best practices for agent-centric architectures. * Ability to implement solutions directly while enabling the team to deliver faster and with higher quality. * Strong organizational and communication skills for effective cross-team collaboration. * Experience building secure, robust, user-centered AI systems that continuously deliver measurable value. * Ability to define and operate engineering processes, sprint rituals, OKRs, and performance feedback loops. * Excellent English communication skills; French is a plus. * Ability to work efficiently in a hybrid environment and travel to meet partners and team members when needed. * Big AI User, every day, for everything, Claude and similar tools have no secret for you.