Director, AI-Native Delivery Management

The Director, AI-Native Delivery Management spans individual engagement ownership and practice-level contribution. The Director personally owns delivery and commercial outcomes for a portfolio of fixed-fee and managed-output AI-native engagements — including, where warranted, operating directly on the most complex ones — while also mentoring Senior AI-Native Delivery Managers on the engagements they run and contributing to the practice's shared playbook, hiring criteria, and training material.

Req# 1093152170

Responsibilities

• Own the definition and delivery of the solution, plus the commercial outcome, for a portfolio of 2-4+ concurrent fixed-fee and/or managed-output AI-native engagements
• Operate directly as the AI-Native DM on the portfolio's most complex or highest-risk engagements, while overseeing Senior AI-Native DMs running the others
• Define deliverables and acceptance criteria, or the output SLA and its measurement cadence, for each engagement in the portfolio before a team is assembled
• Mentor and coach Senior AI-Native Delivery Managers on the engagements they run — particularly on managed-output discipline, where the job is holding an SLA over time rather than delivering a fixed scope once
• Contribute engagement learnings — scope/output and SLA definition patterns, FDE staffing patterns, escalation triggers — into the practice's shared delivery playbook
• Provide input into AI-Native DM and FDE hiring criteria and interview loops, drawing on what's actually working across the portfolio
• Escalate and resolve delivery risk within the portfolio, backstopping Senior DMs without displacing them from their engagements
• Manage the commercial health of the portfolio: margin attainment against sold targets, SLA renegotiation cadence on managed-output engagements, and change-order discipline on fixed-fee engagements
• Own C-level client stakeholder relationships across the portfolio — client sponsors, EPAM BU and account leadership — as the accountable escalation point above the Senior DMs

Requirements

• 10+ years in delivery management, including direct, hands-on ownership of fixed-fee and/or output-based (SLA) engagements, not only T&M
• Demonstrated ability to run multiple concurrent engagements while still personally operating on at least one
• Working knowledge of agentic/AI-assisted delivery tooling and experience implementing an agentic SDLC / AI software factory delivery model
• Real hands-on technical depth, same bar as the Senior AI-Native DM role — able to contribute directly to deliverables on the engagement being personally operated, not just review them; pod size leaves no room for a pure-overhead PM at any level of this practice
• Experience mentoring or coaching other delivery managers, ideally including contributing to onboarding material or delivery playbooks
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills at the C-level across multiple concurrent engagements — comfortable as the senior escalation point with client sponsors and internal leadership
• Commercial acumen: experience owning margin performance across more than one engagement at a time
• Ownership of the solution and the ability to shape it on the engagement(s) being personally operated — same standard as the Senior AI-Native DM, at portfolio scale

Nice to have

• A frontier-lab certification (e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind)
• Experience running or scoping AI activation/enablement programs
• Most likely profile is a professional-services delivery background, but an engineering leader who has personally led an internal transformation to an agentic SDLC is also a strong fit