[Hiring] AI Operations Lead @QAD, Inc.

Role Description

The AI Operations Lead owns how AI runs at QAD after go-live. You will:

• Run AI FinOps (where the money goes, whether it is worth it, and how to keep spend inside budget).
• Build the observability that tells us when an agent is drifting, failing or getting expensive.
• Stand up the operational support model that colleagues across the business rely on when something breaks or they need help.

This is an operations and service ownership role, not a reporting role. You will be measured on:

• AI that stays reliable, affordable and trusted in production.
• Spend against value, agent degradation, and support availability.

Where this role sits:

• Reports to: Head of the AI Centre of Excellence
• Works with: AI Engagement Specialists, Lead AI Architect, Senior AI Engineer, QAD Engineering teams, External implementation partners, AI vendors, Finance, Procurement, IT, Security, GRC, and Legal as required.
• Owns: AI consumption and cost governance, production observability, AI service and incident management orchestration, agent registry and publish gate operations, model refresh operations, and partner and vendor service levels.
• Accountable for: Reliable, affordable, supported AI in production, measured on spend against plan, cost per transaction, service levels and user satisfaction, not ticket counts.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in cloud or platform operations, site reliability engineering or IT service management, including at least 3 years running ML, data or Gen AI workloads in production.
• Cloud FinOps in practice: forecasting, cost allocation, unit economics and optimisation, working with Finance. FinOps certification is welcome; evidence of savings that held is what matters.
• Hands-on with monitoring and tracing tools (for example CloudWatch, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, or LLM tracing tools such as Langfuse or LangSmith).
• Experience defining service level objectives and alerts that people act on.
• Incident, problem, change and request management in an enterprise. ITIL is welcome.
• Working fluency in how LLM applications fail and cost money: tokens and context, model tiers, caching, rate limits, evaluation, hallucination, prompt injection and guardrails.
• Data literacy: able to build and interrogate BI dashboards and define metrics that hold up to scrutiny.
• Partner and vendor management: service levels, commercial reviews, and holding partners to account.
• Clear communication with senior stakeholders: able to explain cost and risk plainly, and to say no to spend that is not justified.
• Calm ownership under pressure: you run the incident, communicate clearly and close it properly.

Requirements

• This role needs credibility with Finance and IT from the first week.
• Experience running a production service and living with its budget.
• Knowledge of what a good on-call rota, a useful alert, and a defensible cost forecast look like.
• Ability to tell when a number on a dashboard is wrong.

Benefits

• Your health and well-being are important to us at QAD. We provide programs that help you strike a healthy work-life balance.
• Opportunity to join a growing business, launching into its next phase of expansion and transformation.
• Collaborative culture of smart and hard-working people who support one another to get the job done.
• An atmosphere of growth and opportunity, where idea-sharing is always prioritized over level or hierarchy.
• Compensation packages based on experience and desired skill set.