What are the responsibilities and job description for the Head of Artificial Intelligence position at Ascendo Resources?
Are you a unicorn?
My client is seeking a commercially minded AI leader to build and scale the company’s AI capabilities across product, infrastructure, and enterprise deployment. This is a unique opportunity to play a foundational leadership role in shaping the future AI strategy, platform architecture, and commercial evolution of a rapidly growing organization.
This role is ideal for a hands-on executive who can bridge deep technical expertise with business execution — someone capable of transforming bespoke AI solutions into scalable, enterprise-grade platform capabilities while partnering closely with executive leadership, investors, product teams, and enterprise clients.
Responsibilities
- Build and scale reusable AI platform capabilities from custom client engagements and applied AI solutions
- Lead services-to-platform transitions that support product scalability and ARR growth
- Drive AI product strategy, commercialization, and infrastructure roadmap decisions
- Evaluate build-vs-buy strategies, infrastructure optimization, and pricing models for AI-enabled products
- Partner with executive leadership on AI roadmap, market positioning, and long-term innovation strategy
- Lead the design and deployment of multi-agent and agentic AI systems
- Oversee development of conversational AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), predictive modeling, and intelligent automation capabilities
- Guide AI infrastructure architecture including model serving, observability, evaluation frameworks, and data pipelines
- Drive scalable multi-tenant AI deployment strategies and operational best practices
- Provide technical leadership across engineering, product, and data science functions
- Establish governance frameworks and operational controls for responsible AI deployment
- Oversee AI security, model risk management, bias/fairness reviews, and regulatory alignment
- Support enterprise AI deployments in regulated industries including healthcare, financial services, and life sciences
- Ensure compliance with frameworks such as HIPAA and GDPR where applicable
- Build and lead high-performing AI, engineering, and product teams
- Serve as a strategic advisor to executive leadership, investors, and enterprise stakeholders
- Support enterprise sales efforts, technical diligence, and customer-facing AI strategy discussions
- Partner cross-functionally with product, engineering, operations, legal, and go-to-market teams
- Communicate effectively with boards, investors, and C-suite leadership regarding AI strategy and execution
Qualifications
- Experience serving as Head of AI, VP of AI, Chief AI Officer, or senior AI/product leadership within a venture-backed or high-growth environment
- Strong technical depth across modern AI architectures, LLMs, agentic systems, RAG frameworks, and scalable AI infrastructure
- Proven experience building AI products and platforms from concept through commercialization
- Experience operating within regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, or life sciences strongly preferred
- Demonstrated success building and leading AI teams in fast-paced environments
- Strong executive presence with the ability to communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Experience with AI governance, model risk management, and responsible AI frameworks
- Deep understanding of AI infrastructure, model evaluation, observability, and deployment best practices
- Commercial mindset with experience supporting enterprise sales, investor discussions, and strategic growth initiatives
- Entrepreneurial mindset with the ability to operate strategically while remaining hands-on where needed
- Strong educational background from a research focused institution is required, ideally a PhD