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Job Description
A Place Where People Matter. Start your career journey with Univar Solutions! Here you can make an impact on the world around you and accelerate your career in areas that energize and excite you. About the
Role:
The primary purpose of the Director, AI Engineering is to lead the team that designs, builds, and scales the AI-powered products and features our customers use every day.
This is a hands-on leadership role: The Director sets the technical direction for AI architecture, model selection, evaluation, and inference across the product portfolio, while remaining close enough to the code and design reviews to make critical decisions firsthand.
The role requires strong executive presence - translating ambiguous business goals into clear technical strategy, representing AI engineering to senior leadership and the board, and driving cross-functional alignment with Product, Research, Security, and Compliance.
The Director owns the AI engineering roadmap, organizational design, and outcomes, ensuring the company can deliver AI features safely, responsibly, and at scale.
The Director leads product-facing AI engineering, partnering closely with the VP of Data & AI, who oversees enterprise data strategy and the MLOps platform.
What You'll Do:
Own and drive the technical roadmap for AI engineering, leading a team of ~15 engineers delivering production AI features such as agents, copilots, and retrieval systems
Define architecture for next-generation, customer-facing AI products, including model selection and build-vs-buy decisions
Partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to translate AI capabilities into measurable customer value
Lead technical execution across LLM/agent systems, inference, and retrieval pipelines, ensuring scalable and reliable delivery
Establish engineering standards, tooling, and best practices for shipping AI features safely and at enterprise scale
Stay hands-on with design reviews and key technical decisions, unblocking teams and maintaining high quality
Build and grow a high-performing engineering team through strong hiring, mentorship, and leadership
Translate ambiguous business goals into clear technical strategy and represent AI engineering to senior leadership and the board
What You'll Need:
10+ years in software engineering, with at least 5 years in engineering leadership roles
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience
Demonstrated track record shipping AI or ML products at scale, with real users, real revenue, and real operational consequences
Where You'll Work:
This is a hybrid-based role that will report out of our headquarters in
Downers Grove, IL Pay & Benefits:
The salary range is $200,000 - $250,000. This role is also eligible for incentive pay.
The specific salary offered to a candidate may be motivated by a variety of factors including the candidate's meaningful experience, education, training, certifications, qualifications, and work location.
Available employee benefits include health, vision, and dental. We also provide 401k matching for retirement and flexible time off. Univar Solutions is a leading, global distributor of chemicals and ingredients essential to the safety, health, and wellbeing of our daily lives from life-saving medicines and vitamins to hand sanitizers and industrial materials used for cleaning, construction, and more. Our global team of more than 9,500 employees support our vision to redefine distribution and be the most valued chemical and ingredient distributor on the planet! We offer a Total Rewards package that includes market aligned pay and incentives as well as a diverse benefits offering to support our employees' physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing. Univar Solutions supports sustainable solutions for the world around us so that we can do our part to help keep our communities healthy, fed, clean, and safe! We are committed to a diverse workforce and a culture of inclusion. Together, we are building a culture that acknowledges the unique experiences, perspectives and expertise of individuals and provides the development and growth opportunities to empower us to redefine our industry. Univar Solutions is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or other protected classification. We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you require a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the hiring process, please contact us at careers@univarsolutions.com. Univar Solutions does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters, employment agencies, or staffing firms (collectively Recruiting Firms). Recruiting Firms must enter into a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with Univar Solutions prior to submitting any information relating to a potential candidate. All searches must be initiated by Univar Solutions' Talent Acquisition team and candidates must be submitted via Applicant Tracking System (ATS) by approved vendors who have been expressly requested to make a submission for a specific job opening. No placement fees will be paid to any firm unless the aforementioned conditions have been met. Contacting our hiring managers directly is prohibited.
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