Role purpose

The Head of AI Engineering and Services is responsible for the end-to-end ownership of the AI product lifecycle, from ideation to deployment and monitoring, ensuring delivery of scalable, secure, and ethical AI solutions across Vodafone. This role leads the development of reusable AI platforms, frameworks, and APIs, and ensures alignment with business needs across B2B, B2T, and internal customers. The role will also operationalize AI capabilities across the organization, avoiding fragmentation and duplication, and establishing a unified AI engineering standard

Key accountabilities and decision ownership

AI Product Lifecycle Ownership 
•    Lead the design, development, deployment, and monitoring of AI/ML models and services, ensuring continuous improvement and retraining based on performance metrics.

 

Platform and Framework Development
•    Build and maintain reusable AI platforms, frameworks, and APIs to accelerate development, ensuring governance, security, and compliance.

 

AI Productization and Operationalization 
•    Move from project-based experimentation to scalable, productized and internally developed AI solutions — accelerating time-to-value, strengthening compliance with emerging regulations, and enhancing Vodafone’s ability to attract and retain top AI talent.
•    Enforce standards, develop policies, and ensure consistency in tools and architecture across Vodafone.

 

Customer-Centric AI Solutions 
•    Develop AI products tailored to the needs of B2B, B2T, and internal customers, co-creating value propositions with commercial teams.
•    Innovate by finding new ways of solving problems and exploiting market opportunities

•    Identify opportunities to provide different and better solutions whilst achieving business benefit.

 

Ethical and Sustainable AI
•    Guarantee ethical AI practices and sustainability in all AI initiatives, aligning with Vodafone’s corporate responsibility goals.

 

Collaboration with other AI Tower pillars to achieve common outstanding results
•    Collaborate with other AI & Data Service Tower Pillars (Strategy & Architecture, Governance, Data Product engineering & Services, Customer solutions & Service Management) to ensure results as per Service Tower objectives 

 

Collaboration with Markets, enabling them to achieve local objectives
•    Implement a hybrid delivery model to ensure balance between standardization and local agility,  ensuring stable platforms, reusable assets, and best-in-class expertise when locally not available.

Core competencies, knowledge and experience

•    10+ year experience working at a senior level in a Global organization, preferred in a global Telco Organization.
•    Proven leadership in building strong and motivated teams, engaged to achieve challenging results, promoting a build vs buy culture, innovation and operational excellence 
•    Proven leadership in global AI and data development and architecture roles (10+ years).
•    Demonstrated success in managing and engaging multicultural, cross-functional teams.
•    Strong experience in AI/ML model development, deployment, and monitoring.
•    Experience in Agile methodologies, especially SAFe, in complex organizations.
•    Ability to translate business needs into AI-driven solutions with measurable impact.

Must have technical / professional qualifications

•     Degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or related field.
•    Proven experience in Big Data and Cloud projects (e.g., GCP, AWS, Azure).
•    Deep knowledge of AI/ML frameworks, main LLM landscape and providers.
•    Experience with MLOps, CI/CD, and software lifecycle management including CI/CD tools, techniques, principles, and software engineering.
•    Familiarity with data protection regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA).
•    Strong understanding of ethical AI principles and governance.