Director, Software Engineering - Agentic AI

Director, Software Engineering - Agentic AI

Who are we?

Help us challenge assumptions, uncover bias, and remove barriers—because progress starts with fresh ideas. You’ll find belonging, purpose, and a team that welcomes you—because when you feel valued, you’re empowered to do your best work.

Job Summary

Equinix Incubation builds the agentic systems that run the software delivery lifecycle end to end: a fleet of specialized AI agents, with humans directing the work and owning every gate. Someone has to own the product, the roadmap, and the team behind it. That is this role.

You will lead the engineering pods that build the orchestration layer, the persona consoles, and the agents themselves, and carry the roadmap from first MVP to organization-wide scale. This is a player-coach role for a leader who can hold a product vision, an architecture, an executive audience, and a hiring plan in their head at the same time.

Responsibilities

Own the Product and the Roadmap

• Define and drive the delivery-engine roadmap: orchestrator, agent fleet, consoles, dashboards, and enterprise integrations, sequenced for value

• Make the build-measure-learn loop real: ship in sprints, pilot with live delivery teams, and let adoption and telemetry reshape the plan

• Own trade-off decisions across scope, quality, cost, and speed, and defend them with data in front of senior leadership

Build and Lead the Pods

• Hire, grow, and retain a small, exceptional team of agent engineers, platform engineers, and delivery talent across the UK and India

• Run lean pods where agents do the routine work and people do the judgment work; model that way of working yourself

• Set a high, kind bar: clear expectations, honest feedback, and career growth in the most modern engineering discipline there is

Prove the Value

• Own the value story: cycle time, throughput, quality, adoption, and realized business value, instrumented and reported without drama

• Keep the economics honest: agent cost, platform cost, and capacity unlocked, treated as first-class engineering metrics

• Turn pilot wins into an expansion case that finance and function leaders believe

Set the Operating Standard

• Establish how agent-first engineering is done: evals as release gates, human-in-the-loop approvals, and responsible AI governance with InfoSec and the AI council

• Represent the platform in architecture and governance forums, and keep the roadmap aligned with enterprise platform and data strategy

• Share patterns, standards, and playbooks so other teams can adopt what your team proves

What Success Looks Like

• The delivery engine is in daily use by live delivery teams, with measurable cycle-time and quality gains that survive finance scrutiny

• You have built a team people want to join, with a hiring record and retention that show it

• Executives trust your roadmap because what you commit to ships, and what ships gets measured

• The operating standards your team set are being adopted beyond your team

Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years leading engineering teams or engineering-led products

• A record of shipping and scaling platforms or products in an enterprise, from first release through adoption

• Hands-on fluency with modern AI: LLM-powered applications, agentic systems, and what it takes to make them production-grade

• Strong architectural judgment across APIs, event-driven systems, cloud platforms, and enterprise integration

• Proven hiring and talent development record, including building distributed teams

• Executive-grade communication: you can carry a room of senior stakeholders with a clear, honest narrative

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience delivering AI or automation platforms into regulated or security-conscious enterprises

• Experience with agent frameworks and protocols such as MCP or A2A, and with eval-driven quality practices

• Experience running product operating models: roadmaps, funding cases, value realization

• ·Background in developer platforms, SDLC tooling, or engineering productivity

Core Competencies

Product & Technical Leadership

• Roadmap ownership; architectural judgment; trade-off decision-making; systems thinking

People Leadership

• Hiring and talent development; lean pod design; coaching; distributed team leadership

AI-First Operating Model

• ·       Agent-first ways of working; evals and governance; human-in-the-loop design; value instrumentation

Executive Influence

• Narrative and communication; stakeholder alignment; funding and value cases; calm under scrutiny

Why This Role

Incubation is a durable capability, not a project team: the team persists, and the product rotates. Agentic delivery is product one; the next incubation bets follow. You will define how AI-first engineering works at Equinix and build the team that proves it. Few director roles come with a mandate this clear and a canvas this open.

Equinix is committed to ensuring that our employment process is open to all individuals, including those with a disability.  If you are a qualified candidate and need assistance or an accommodation, please let us know by completing this form.

Equinix is an Equal Employment Opportunity and, in the U.S., an Affirmative Action employer.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to unlawful consideration of race, color, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, ancestry, place of birth, citizenship, sex, pregnancy / childbirth or related medical conditions, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital or domestic partnership status, age, veteran or military status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, political / organizational affiliation, status as a victim or family member of a victim of crime or abuse, or any other status protected by applicable law. 

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This posting is a new position within our organization.

Experience Level

Executive Level