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# Director, Software Engineering

- **Company:** Cognex Corporation
- **Location:** Natick, MA, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $320,000
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Computing Platforms, Computer Vision, Cloud Engineering, Continuous Delivery, Machine Learning, Online Service Provider, Cloud Services, Software Engineering, Prompt Engineering, Generative AI, Backend, Agentic-AI, Information Technology, Low Latency, Machine Learning Operations, Api Design, Model Context Protocol, Data Pipelines
- **Published:** November 8, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.juju.com/job/28_25304_8a49a4685e998b0ef71b5a44742f59eb

## About the Role

* 15+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in senior engineering leadership roles managing managers and/or multiple engineering teams, with a proven track record of building high-performing organizations, delivering business-critical products, and driving technical strategy.
 * Track record of shipping and scaling complex platforms and cloud/online services in production.
 * Experience leading R&D or applied-research efforts from concept to shipped product
 * Demonstrated experience turning ambiguous customer problems into shipped products, scalable products and technical strategy
 * Deep expertise in backend/cloud architecture, API design and platform engineering.
 * Hands-on familiarity with modern AI application architectures, including LLMOps, agentic systems, tool integration, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), Model Context Protocol, and evaluation harness design, prompt management, and production observability.
 * Strong strategic and execution-oriented mindset, with the ability to balance ambitious AI innovation against reliability, scalability, cost, and deployment constraints.
 * Exceptional communication, influencing, and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to align technical teams, executives, customers, and cross-functional partners around a shared vision and execution plan.
 * Customer-focused leadership approach, with a passion for solving real-world customer problems through innovative software platforms and AI-driven experiences.

Preferred Experience & Qualifications

 * Computer vision, machine learning inference, or edge/embedded deployment systems.
 * Background in industrial automation, manufacturing, robotics, or logistics.
 * Experience productizing AI capabilities at scale, beyond prototypes and proof-of-concepts.
 * Experience working with developer platforms, APIs, SDKs, or ecosystems that enable other teams to build and innovate more quickly.
 * Advanced degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field.

## Description

* Set the technical vision and multi-year roadmap for a new Applied AI platform to simplify complex, multi-step customer workflows across Cognex's product portfolio.
 * Direct applied R&D on emerging AI capabilities, with structured experimentation and prototyping and a clear path from research to production.
 * Lead architecture decisions spanning embedded devices, edge compute, and cloud services and infrastructure, ensuring seamless experiences across hybrid experiences.
 * Own the reliability, scalability, security, cost efficiency and operational excellences of the services that power the platform, including APIs, model-serving infrastructure, data pipelines, and connected experiences.
 * Establish the engineering standards, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, and operational practices (SLAs, on-call, incident response) required to deliver trustworthy AI systems in production, balancing capability, reliability, latency, safety, and operating cost.
 * Partner with Product, R&D, UX, and Hardware organizations to turn ambiguous problems into shipped capabilities, on committed timelines.
 * Drive adoption of the platform across Cognex's product portfolio, enabling product teams to rapidly build and consume shared AI capabilities and services.
 * Track the fast-moving AI landscape and translate external advances into pragmatic bets for Cognex.
 * Drive cost efficiency, observability, and continuous delivery across cloud and hybrid (edge-plus-cloud) deployments, with privacy and security built in.
 * Grow, lead, and mentor a high-impact engineering organization, building a culture of ownership, technical rigor and execution excellence