Job Description, Responsibilities & Requirements
About the Position
Technical Director - AI
Location: London, UK
Type: Remote / Hybrid
About Valtech
Valtech is a global digital agency focused on enabling business transformation. We help clients anticipate tomorrow’s trends and connect more directly with their consumers across digital and physical touchpoints. With expertise in experience design, technology, and marketing, our passion lies in addressing transformational business challenges. We operate across five continents with over 6,000 innovators in twenty-two countries, helping organizations reimagine the way they connect with their customers, leverage data, and transform their business operations.
The Role
The Technical Director will play a key role in shaping and delivering large-scale, global transformation initiatives for our most strategic clients. You will lead a community of talented people who are enthusiastic about building best-in-class digital solutions.
Responsibilities
Strategic Client Leadership
- Build relationships with senior technology stakeholders within our clients’ businesses.
- Serve as the transformation lead for major enterprise clients, helping define, shape, and deliver vision, technology strategy, implementation, operating model amends, and revisions.
- Advance accounts through the identification of new opportunities, ensuring any upsell and cross-sell opportunities are rooted in client business requirements and have robust ROI returns.
- Recommend AI tooling and usage patterns that deliver measurable return on investment for our clients.
- Recommend the use of AI within clients’ products where appropriate, to deliver value for their customers and end users.
- Review and design operating models for AI adoption, ensuring centralized reuse of AI pipelines, skills repositories, and plug-ins across client engagements.
- Drive strategic alignment across enterprise functions and digital workstreams, ensuring initiatives ladder up into a cohesive strategy.
- Ensure business strategy alignment with the work being delivered. Be accountable for the successful delivery of the work.
- Represent Valtech as a voice of authority and confidence and lead our clients through their initiatives with expert guidance.
- Be the technical escalation point for issues within assigned clients, and be proactive in identifying and dealing with issues as soon as they arise.
Technical Leadership
- Provide first-class technical leadership within the client environment; enable, guide, and coach teams to navigate complexity and effectively deliver transformational programs of work.
- Be an enabler for Artificial Intelligence adoption to drive efficiency and innovation for clients, acting as an agent of change within delivery teams and empowering them to use AI effectively in their day-to-day work.
- Consult with senior client stakeholders to advise on technology adoption to achieve outcomes.
- Identify, mentor, and develop future technical leaders within the assigned client delivery teams.
- Support and influence across delivery layers, from digital platforms and product teams to governance and business capabilities.
- Strengthen the technical presence and drive involvement within the global Valtech community around transformation matters and modern software delivery.
- Make transformation a reality by balancing strategic direction with continuous, on-the-ground progress.
- Bring industry knowledge into engagements, challenge internal assumptions, and equip teams to solve big problems effectively.
- Drive training, evangelism, and excitement around AI products and product selection across delivery teams.
- Create a culture of sharing around AI adoption: surfacing what works and what doesn’t, forming clans and communities of practice to drive forward adoption, and operationalizing the rollout of new AI tooling across teams.
- Expose internal systems and tooling to AI pipelines via MCP, CLIs, and equivalent integration patterns, with appropriate context-management strategies.
- Gather, generate, and synthesize strong opinions and thought leadership on technology trends. Align those trends against the business needs of Valtech and the clients.
- Support client engagements by aligning technical work with Valtech and client technology, security, and certification standards and ensure technical standards and processes are upheld, delivering best-in-class solutions.
- Ensure governance and decision-making processes are effective.
People
- Help teams adopt good practices and techniques to deliver quality software at pace.
- Advocate for delivery methods (especially agile) and their impact on technology planning/strategy.
- Ensure teams consider risks, impacts, and consequences of decisions.
- Assist recruitment teams in talent acquisition aligned to the needs of client projects and alignment to Valtech’s Culture and People Growth Framework.
- Validate hiring processes and ensure team composition meets delivery requirements.
- Line manage and develop people through our Professional Development Processes and our People Growth Framework.
- Foster an environment of psychological safety, grasping every opportunity for ongoing and continuous improvement, turning all problems into opportunities to gain experience and grow.
- Support teams through the change brought by AI adoption, helping individuals navigate evolving ways of working.
- Set personal development plans that reflect AI capability growth alongside core technical and consulting skills.
- Leverage certifications and partner programs, feeding these into individual training plans and demonstrating the value back to clients and partners.
Partners
- Build deep relationships with our technical partners, our client's technical partners, and stay abreast of their developments and roadmaps to inform strategic decisions.
- Support and sponsor technical events.
- Be seen as an advocate and thought leader for the technologies we implement on behalf of our partners.
Growth
- Support sales, marketing, and account management teams to explore growth opportunities within clients.
- Contribute to bids, proposals, and pitches, ensuring technical alignment and excellence.
- Share insights and learning from client work to influence our local and global approaches to transformation.
- Shape go-to-market strategies for our AI propositions, including positioning, packaging, and target client segments.
- Define and evidence return-on-investment narratives for AI adoption with clients.
- Develop core pitch materials and reusable collateral around our AI approaches, methodologies, and case studies.
Requirements
Essential Expertise
- A proven record of leading large-scale, transformation projects for globally recognized brand names.
- Experience navigating large, complex organizations to connect silos and align multiple workstreams.
- Proven consulting skills and the ability to influence C-level stakeholders with both credibility and humility.
Skills
- Use of AI in enterprise software development.
- Technical fluency across platforms, architecture, cloud, and modern delivery practices.
- Enthusiastic about technology, developing teams, and delivering successful outcomes.
- Proven record building and leading communities of technologists.
- Adaptable to change and fostering cultural shifts within the organization.
Technology Domains
- Technical leadership in a Product environment.
- AI pipelines across the software development lifecycle.
- Spec-driven development practices.
- Centralized skills and reuse across teams and projects.
- Tooling experience with the Anthropic Claude Code suite.
- AI-assisted delivery across the full lifecycle.
- AI governance: risk management for AI systems, PII exposure controls, EU AI Act 2024 compliance, and DPIAs.
- AI product engineering: designing and building AI-native products for clients.
- MCP architectures and agentic architectures for tool use and orchestration.
- Model selection and fine-tuning strategies aligned to use case, cost, and performance.
- Prompt management, context management, and chunking strategies for retrieval and long-context workloads.
- Conversational interfaces, natural language, and voice as primary user experiences.
- DevSecOps culture.
- Continuous integration/delivery/deployment.
- Infrastructure automation and the evolution of infrastructure.
- Cloud experience in a major hyper-scaler (Google, Microsoft, and/or AWS).
- Secure by design principles.
What We Offer
At Valtech, you will become part of our exceptional team of more than 6,000 talented innovators, design thinkers, creatives, and engineers. We provide everyone with a large degree of freedom - in return, we expect an equally high degree of accountability and dedication. We transform by doing and are insanely enthusiastic about improving the end-user experience.
We are a people company. We share our knowledge and learnings; we dare to speak up and take risks. And we care deeply about one another, our clients, and the world around us. We have always worked hard on providing everyone within our organization the opportunity to gain experience and transform their job opportunities and career paths across the world.
Valtech Benefits
Here at Valtech, we are big believers that our staff are our most important asset, and as such, we want to make sure we look after you. We offer:
- Hybrid & flexible working
- Pension
- Life insurance
- 25 days holiday
- Phone
- Laptop
- BUPA private healthcare & dental
- Commitment to continuous learning and development
- Clear growth and development path
- Access to professional coaching and online learning courses
- Inclusive and diverse workforce
- Health and social well-being focus
- Cycle to Work Scheme
- Employee Assistance Programme
- Eye tests
- Flu Jab
- Regular Company Days
- Staff parties
Recruitment Process
We appreciate that interviews can be daunting. At Valtech, we aim to make the interview process an approachable, two-way conversation, which allows us to get to know you and for you to get to know us. As part of our efforts to ensure the recruitment process is fair and consistent, we have put in place measures and initiatives to ensure we are not rating people differently due to our own bias.
If you would like to know more about our recruitment framework, click here.
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