Associate Director_3367

About the Job

The AI Factory is a central delivery unit at Allianz Technology that builds and deploys AI-powered solutions across the Allianz Group. It runs four pillars, Personal Productivity, AI-Native Ways of Working, Application Rebuild & Modernization, and AI Use Case Delivery, on top of a shared AI platform ecosystem that provides the runtime, governance, observability, and reusable building blocks every solution runs on.

The AI Factory Lead India will head the AI Factory's India team members in India: AI Engagement Managers who shape and steer OE engagements, Forward Deployed Engineers who build and ship the underlying solutions, and AI Platform Engineers who build and operate the shared AI platform every solution runs on. Together they turn OE and Group pain points into deliverable, funded AI projects through a defined lifecycle from Idea to Handover, backed by a growing library of reusable AI building blocks that turn one OE's solution into the next OE's head start. The AI Factory Lead India will also bridge the end-to-end delivery, setting priorities across concurrent engagements, growing and coaching AI Engagement Managers, Forward Deployed Engineers, and AI Platform Engineers, and acting as the senior escalation point with AI Factory, Allianz Technology leadership, Heads of ITs', and Account Managers. The role balances demand shaping and delivery execution with platform health, and represents the India team within Allianz Technology's global AI Factory leadership.

What You Do

- Lead and grow the India AI Factory team - AI Engagement Managers, Forward Deployed Engineers, and AI Platform Engineers and other AI roles - setting priorities across concurrent OE engagements.
- Coach and develop team members; manage workload distribution, performance, hiring, and career growth across all three disciplines.
- Own the Factory's India delivery portfolio: sequence engagements, resolve cross-team resource conflicts, and ensure reusable patterns (MVS, AI Building Blocks, platform capabilities) flow between projects.
- Act as the senior escalation point and relationship owner with OE leadership, Heads of IT, and Account Managers, unblocking engagements Engagement Managers cannot resolve alone.
- Own the India team's overall demand pipeline; prioritize opportunities, allocate Engagement Managers, and balance qualification, delivery, and run-support work across concurrent engagements.
- Represent the AI Factory in governance forums, portfolio reviews, and budget and resourcing conversations with senior stakeholders, up to CTO and Board level where required.
- Ensure the AI Platform Engineers' roadmap (runtime, governance, FinOps, observability) reflects needs surfaced by live engagements.
- Champion reuse: ensure Forward Deployed Engineers contribute new patterns back to the central building-block catalogue and Engagement Managers factor reuse into scoping.
- Own the build-to-run handover model - including support models, SLAs/OLAs, runbooks, and MLOps/monitoring - and maintain oversight of security, compliance, and responsible-AI standards across all Factory deliverables.
- Track Factory-wide KPIs (time-to-value, reuse rate, delivery predictability, platform cost and reliability) and drive continuous improvement.

What You Bring

- Proven experience leading multi-disciplinary technical teams (delivery/engagement, engineering, and platform functions) in large, matrix organizations, ideally in insurance or another regulated environment; knowledge of Allianz Group and Allianz Technology is a plus.
- People management track record: hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development across senior technical and delivery roles.
- Senior enough for OE leadership and Head of IT conversations, technical enough to challenge scope and platform decisions honestly.
- Strong stakeholder, business-framing, and roadmap-shaping skills, with the ability to prepare clear decision materials for executive audiences.
- Experience running a delivery portfolio: demand shaping, prioritization, resourcing, budget ownership, and risk management across concurrent engagements.
- An entrepreneurial mindset: comfortable taking ownership and driving topics forward in a build-up environment without waiting for perfect structure.
- A degree in business, management, technology, or a related field.
- Fluent in English.

Not expected to hands-on build or hold formal certifications (e.g., TOGAF, Zachman) - working knowledge of the following is needed to guide trade-offs, hold credible technical conversations with the team, and challenge or support architectural and platform decisions:

- Enterprise and solution architecture concepts - technical blueprints, reusable solution frameworks, AI reference architectures, and integration standards.
- GenAI-enabled capabilities such as intelligent assistants, copilots, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agents, and automation pipelines.
- Architecture patterns for multi-system integration, API orchestration, and data harmonization.
- Cloud-native platforms and services on at least one major hyperscaler (Azure, AWS, or GCP).
- The modern AI/data stack - vector databases, embedding stores, agentic frameworks, orchestration tools, and LLM/agent framework integration.
- AI governance and responsible-AI principles, including model governance, data lineage, and auditability.
- Solution lifecycle management and reuse practices (MVS, AI Building Blocks) across sandbox, standardization, and retirement stages.

What We Offer

- We offer a hybrid work model which recognizes the value of striking a balance between in-person collaboration and remote working, including up to 25 days per year working from abroad.
- We believe in rewarding performance and our compensation and benefits package includes a company bonus scheme, pension, employee shares program and multiple employee discounts (details vary by location).
- From career development and digital learning programs to international career mobility, we offer lifelong learning for our employees worldwide and an environment where innovation, delivery and empowerment are fostered.
- Flexible working, health and wellbeing offers (including healthcare and parental leave benefits) support to balance family and career and help our people return from career breaks with experience that nothing else can teach.

About Allianz Technology

With its headquarters in Munich, Germany, Allianz Technology is Allianz's global IT service provider and delivers IT solutions that drive the group's digitalization. With more than 11,000 employees in over 20 countries around the world, Allianz Technology is tasked with running, optimizing, transforming, and innovating the infrastructure, applications, and services together with Allianz companies to co-create the best customer experience.

We service the entire spectrum of digitalization, from one of the industry's largest IT infrastructure projects that spans data centres, networks, and security, to application platforms ranging from workplace services to digital interaction. In short: We deliver comprehensive end-to-end IT solutions for Allianz in the digital age. We are the backbone of Allianz. Find us at: www.linkedin.com/company/allianz-technology.

Commitment to Integrity, Fairness & Inclusion

Allianz Technology is proud to be an equal opportunity employer dedicated to fostering an inclusive work environment for everyone. We embrace individuals of all gender identities and expressions, sexual orientations, ethnicities, ages, nationalities, religions, disabilities, and philosophies of life. Our greatest strength as a company lies in the unique skills, experiences, and backgrounds our employees contribute.

Allianz Group is one of the most trusted insurance and asset management companies in the world. Caring for our employees, their ambitions, dreams and challenges is what makes us a unique employer. We are united by a shared commitment: to put our customers first and at the center of everything we do. Their needs inspire our thinking and guide our actions. Together, we can build an environment where everyone feels empowered and confident to explore, grow and shape a better future – for our customers and for the world around us.

At Allianz, we stand for unity: we believe that a united world is a more prosperous world, and we are dedicated to consistently advocating for equal opportunities for all. The foundation for this is our inclusive workplace, where people and performance both matter, and where integrity, fairness, inclusion and trust are at the heart of our culture. We therefore welcome applications regardless of race, ethnicity or cultural background, age, gender, nationality, religion, social class, disability or sexual orientation, or any other characteristics protected under applicable local laws and regulations.

Join us. Let's care for tomorrow.

Note: Having different strengths, experiences, perspectives and approaches is an integral part of Allianz‘ company culture. One means to achieve this is a regular rotation of Allianz employees across functions, Allianz entities and geographies. Therefore, Allianz expects from its employees a general openness and a high motivation to regularly change positions and collect experiences across Allianz Group.