Senior Director, Data Platform and AI

✨ ONE PLATFORM, A WHOLE WORLD OF OPPORTUNITY The best jobs are often restricted to a few wealthy cities, but talent exists everywhere. Oyster set out to change this by launching a global employment platform that enables companies to hire, pay, and support talent anywhere. We’re proof that a strong, engaged culture doesn't require an office. Since January 2020, Oyster has: 🌏 Built a distributed team of 400+ across 60+ countries 👩‍💻 Featured in Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2024/01/25/work-from-home-or-anywhere-top-30-companies-for-remote-jobs-in-2024/ as #9 in FlexJobs Top 30 Companies for remote jobs 🌈 Formed a diverse leadership team and a workforce that’s 60% female 🏆 Earned top employee engagement scores 🦄 Raised $286 million; valued at $1.2 billion 💚 Achieved B Corp status in 2023 Our momentum shows the power of global employment, and we’re just getting started! If you want to help us drive change and work remotely, we’d love for you to apply! The Role While this position is posted in a specific location, all of Oyster’s positions are fully remote and you can work from home. Forever. To create the best experience for our new hire, this role requires you to be based within +3 / -7 UTC. As the Senior Director, Data Platform and AI, you will own the technical infrastructure and strategic direction that transforms Oyster into an AI-native global platform, decoupling scaling overhead from platform usage growth. Part of our Senior Tech Leadership Team, this highly specialized leadership role unites data platforms, product analytics pipelines, knowledge management, and advanced automation layer frameworks. You will lead the effort to transition AI initiatives from isolated experimentation into centralized systems. This is an organizational transformation role as much as a technical one. You will leverage AI to optimize our internal workflows, modernize our knowledge architecture, and directly enhance our customer-facing product. By building unified data structures and connectivity pipelines, you will directly lower our cost-to-serve and equip our global teams with the clear data and context they need to operate efficiently. Crucially, you will also educate and empower teams across Oyster to scale their own AI use productively. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Drive the company-wide AI agenda: scaling local AI initiatives into centralized production systems that create measurable business value. - Own broad, high-impact AI initiatives that have cross functional impact: Moving our AI usage from past narrow or siloed automation examples to execute a company operational transformation. - Partner with Product, Engineering, and operational leaders to embed AI capabilities into our customer-facing platform, internal business workflows, and core processes. - Serve as the ultimate technical authority for our data and AI infrastructure, making critical architectural decisions across MLOps pipelines, LLM orchestration frameworks, and distributed data systems. - Oversee the development of a scalable corporate data platform that serves as the foundational bedrock for all AI and machine learning capabilities. - Transform our internal knowledge base by building the systemic data architecture needed to turn unstructured information into intelligent, easily searchable, and actionable assets. - Re-build and evolve our company-wide data structures and connectivity pipelines to be optimized to deploy, run, and maintain AI models efficiently while lowering cost-to-serve. - Set the company wide tooling standards, maintain technical quality guardrails, and establish engineering best practices for embedded AI specialists working within distinct business units. - Actively support the implementation of key local solutions built by decentralized specialists, ensuring they have the tools and centralized platform support required to succeed. - Maintain high levels of ethical compliance by ensuring all global AI initiatives strictly adher...