Director

Role Purpose

At Coats Digital, we are dedicated to building cutting-edge SaaS applications for the dynamic fashion industry. Our solutions help brands and manufacturers streamline planning, optimize costing, and enhance operational efficiency. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamental to the next generation of our products.

As the Director, Software Engineering (AI), you will be responsible for the AI and machine learning portfolio at Coats Digital. This includes leading the development of novel AI-powered products and seamlessly integrating AI capabilities into our existing SaaS applications. You will manage and grow a team of talented engineers and testers, building out specialist AI/ML roles as our portfolio matures.

This role demands a blend of strategic leadership and deep technical expertise. You will be instrumental in defining Coats Digital's AI roadmap, making critical build-vs-buy decisions on AI technologies, and staying hands-on to prototype, evaluate approaches, and set technical direction. While our current focus is on LLM integrations using services like Azure OpenAI, you will progressively build the team's capabilities in classical machine learning, including developing custom models for domain-specific challenges within the apparel industry. Collaboration with other Software Engineering Directors is key to embedding AI features across their product portfolios while also delivering on your own initiatives.

People Management Responsibility

Direct reports: 5 (scaling to ~10)

Role type: Manager of a team, Teams Manager (manager of multiple teams)

Key Relationships

Internal (excluding direct team and manager): Software Engineering Directors, Development Teams, Product Managers, Scrum Masters, Quality Assurance Team, DevOps.

External: AI/ML Vendors and Research Partners, Cloud AI Teams (e.g. Azure AI, OpenAI), Security Auditors, Data Governance Functions.

Education, Qualifications and Experience

Essential:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a leadership role managing engineering teams.
• Proven experience delivering AI/ML-powered products or features into production.
• Strong understanding of large language models, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and LLM integration patterns.
• Familiarity with classical machine learning techniques and their appropriate applications (e.g., supervised learning, time-series forecasting, classification).
• Experience evaluating and adopting cloud AI services (e.g., Azure OpenAI, Azure Machine Learning).
• Demonstrated ability to define and drive technical strategy across a product portfolio.
• Strong stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to influence across business functions.
• Experience building and growing engineering teams, including hiring for specialist roles.
• Excellent communication skills, able to articulate AI concepts to non-technical audiences.

Desirable:

• Experience with MLOps practices (model versioning, monitoring, retraining pipelines).
• Familiarity with data engineering and data pipeline design.
• Experience with .NET and/or modern web application stacks.
• Azure certifications (e.g., Azure AI Engineer Associate, Azure Solutions Architect Expert).
• Fashion industry or manufacturing experience.
• Experience working with distributed or remote engineering teams.
• Knowledge of supply chain concepts such as demand planning, production scheduling, procurement, or inventory optimization within garment, apparel, or any other manufacturing or retail context. Candidates who can connect AI solutions to supply chain problems will stand out.