Director of AI Engineering
About the Role This is not a rebranded Director of Engineering. It is a new position purpose-built for a new way of building software. Cover Whale is operating an agentic engineering model where pods of product managers, engineers, and AI agents deliver production software together. The Director of AI Platform Engineering owns the platform those pods operate on — the agent orchestration layer, trust boundaries, human-in-the-loop controls, and evaluation pipelines that make it safe and effective to delegate work to AI at production scale.
You will be a player-coach: hands-on building the platform while also leading and developing the engineering team. Your mandate is to ensure that humans and AI agents collaborate safely, reliably, and at velocity.
What You'll Own
- Agentic Platform Architecture Human-in-the-loop boundaries — setting trust thresholds where AI-generated output is auto-approved versus escalated for review
- Prompt and spec evaluation pipelines — the systems that validate whether AI-generated code, tests, and configurations meet production standards before reaching a human reviewer
- The end-to-end specification-through-deployment pipeline: how specs become agent instructions and how agent output becomes production code
- Evaluation and integration of emerging AI tooling, models, and agent frameworks
Engineering System Integrity
- Quality gates calibrated for AI-augmented velocity — ensuring AI-generated output meets production standards Engineering standards: branch protection, test coverage, CI/CD rules, and deployment integrity
- Architectural escalation path for engineers facing technical blockers
- Collaboration with the Technical Program Leader on engineering flow patterns and systemic bottlenecks
People Leadership for an Agentic Team
- Coaching engineers through the identity shift from "I write code" to "I orchestrate AI agents and own outcomes" Career development, performance accountability, and 1:1s — with expectations calibrated to the expanded role of delegate, review, and own
- Building team culture where engineers treat AI agents as force multipliers, not threats
What You Won't Own
- Product direction, spec writing, or feature prioritization (that's the product management team's role)
- Pod-level delivery — the pod is PM + Engineer + AI Agents; you govern the platform they operate on
- Company-wide AI enablement and adoption (that's the AI Enablement Lead