Executive Director, Enterprise Agent… at Sony Pictures… · Culver…

Executive Director, Enterprise Agent Platform

Location: Culver City, California · Hybrid

We're looking for an exceptional technology leader and hands-on builder who wants to help redefine how a global entertainment company operates through AI.

This is an opportunity to build, lead, and scale Sony Pictures Entertainment's enterprise AI agent ecosystem, creating the platforms, capabilities, and engineering practices that will transform how work gets done across the business.

As Executive Director, Enterprise Agent Platform reporting to the SVP, Enterprise Intelligence Platform, you'll own one of the company's most exciting emerging technology capabilities. You'll define our enterprise agent platform strategy, make critical technology decisions, and build and lead a high-performing team who turn ambitious ideas into production-ready solutions.

This is a leadership role for someone who wants to build, not just oversee. You'll remain deeply hands-on with the technology, actively shaping architecture, solving complex engineering challenges, and working alongside your team to deliver results. You'll be expected to stay at the forefront of a rapidly evolving AI landscape, continuously evaluating emerging technologies, challenging conventional approaches, and translating new possibilities into practical business solutions.

You'll work alongside leaders who value technical depth, intellectual curiosity, collaboration, and a bias for action. Success requires someone who can move seamlessly between strategy and execution, stay closely connected to the work happening across their own and partner teams, and bring the technical credibility to influence decisions at every level.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN, BUILD & SHAPE

Define and Evolve Our Enterprise AI Agent Strategy

• Own the strategy, selection, architecture, and evolution of SPE's enterprise agent platforms. You'll evaluate emerging technologies, make critical platform decisions, and establish the engineering standards that enable AI agents to scale securely and effectively across the organization.
• You'll stay ahead of developments in agentic AI, continuously assessing new platforms, capabilities, and approaches while ensuring our technology decisions position SPE for both immediate impact and long-term success.

Build, Lead & Engineer Alongside a Team

• This is not a traditional leadership role where you set direction and delegate the technical work. You'll remain actively engaged in architecture, engineering, prototyping, technical problem-solving, and critical design decisions.
• You'll set a high engineering bar, develop exceptional technical talent, and create a culture of curiosity, experimentation, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Turn Big Ideas Into Production Solutions, Fast

• You’ll take high-priority business opportunities from concept to production in weeks, not quarters.
• You'll champion a builder-oriented approach that prioritizes speed, simplicity, and measurable results. By leveraging native platform capabilities, connectors, and reusable components rather than unnecessarily developing custom applications, you'll help the team deliver solutions faster and more efficiently.
• You'll know when to experiment, when to make decisions, and when to scale and balance urgency with the engineering discipline needed to build reliable, enterprise-ready solutions.

Build the Foundation for Enterprise-Wide Scale

• You'll establish reusable architectures, engineering patterns, and a shared pattern library that make every new solution faster to deliver, easier to maintain, and more effective than the last.
• You'll also own the agent registry, control plane, and AgentOps capabilities, including monitoring, incident management, lifecycle management, and cost optimization. This will be to ensure a growing portfolio of enterprise AI agents remains secure, observable, reliable, and accountable.

Stay Ahead of Technology and Connected to the Business

• This role will require you to operate at the forefront of a rapidly changing AI landscape, bringing fresh thinking, technical insights, and emerging capabilities into SPE.
• You'll maintain a deep understanding of what's happening across your own engineering teams, adjacent technology organizations, and the broader AI ecosystem. Working closely with the AI and Data Platform, Software Factory, Forward Deployed Engineers, and business technology teams, you'll connect technical innovation with enterprise priorities and identify opportunities to accelerate delivery and increase impact.
• You'll be expected to challenge assumptions, share knowledge, influence technical direction, and help ensure SPE is making smart, forward-looking technology decisions.

Drive Innovation That Delivers Measurable Business Impact

• Success won't be defined by the number of agents deployed or the sophistication of the technology alone. It will be measured by how effectively your team turns innovation into scalable solutions that make a real difference to the business.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Agent delivery and business process optimization

• Partner directly with business teams to redesign how work gets done, and deliver prioritized agent opportunities from idea to production in weeks, not quarters.
• Select the enterprise agent platform that fits each use case and build on its existing primitives and structure rather than custom development.
• Stay hands-on designing, building and reviewing solutions alongside the team.

Pattern library

• Build and maintain SPE’s library of reusable process and agent patterns (reference designs, templates, configurations and testing approaches), so every solution is faster to deliver and easier to maintain than the last.
• Set the standard for how SPE builds agents.

Agent registry, control plane and AgentOps

• Own engineering and operations for the agent portfolio: the agent registry and control plane, monitoring, incidents, lifecycle and cost.
• Partner with Information Security on guardrails.
• Define and report on outcome metrics (adoption, cycle time, cost and business impact) for every production agent.

Team leadership

• Build, lead and develop a high-performing team of agent architects, a governance/AgentOps lead and agent builders.
• Own hiring, coaching, performance management and career development, and grow the team as the agent portfolio expands.

Adoption and partnership

• Champion agent adoption and change across the business.

• Work with the AI and Data Platform, Software Factory and Forward Deployed Engineers teams on shared capabilities and patterns, and manage relationships with agent platform vendors and system integrators.

REQUIREMENTS:

• 10+ years in software or platform engineering, including 5+ years leading engineering teams

• Shipped and operated production AI agents on at least one enterprise agent platforms by configuring and extending platform capabilities, not by building custom applications from scratch

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

• Proven track record of building reusable, maintainable patterns that other teams adopt, and the judgment to know when platform primitives are enough and when custom engineering is truly needed

• Track record of delivering measurable business outcomes and driving adoption of new ways of working

• Experience meeting enterprise security, governance and data-handling requirements when shipping AI to production; media, entertainment or rights-sensitive industry experience preferred

• Moderate to advanced experience working with and/or managing MOST of the following:
  • Enterprise Agent Platforms (platform-first delivery):
    • Low-code / no-code agent builders
    • Platform-native primitives (topics and actions, flows, connectors, knowledge sources)
  • • Platform lifecycle management (environments, solutions, deployment pipelines)
  • • Agent control planes and admin centers
  • • Platform selection across vendors
  • Agent Engineering:
    • Tool and connector design, MCP, A2A
  • • Retrieval (RAG) and vector search
  • • Agent evaluation frameworks
  • • Prompt, context and harness engineering
  • • Multiagent orchestration patterns
  • Governance and AgentOps:
    • Agent registry and lifecycle
  • • Identity and access for agents
  • • Observability and tracing
  • • AI cost management and FinOps
  • • Responsible AI and AI governance frameworks
  • Cloud and Engineering Foundations:
    • Cloud AI services and model gateways
  • • CI/CD and infrastructure as code
  • • API management and enterprise integration

LEADERSHIP COMPETENCIES:

• Hands-on player-coach, comfortable building a team from scratch and moving fast
• Hands-on technical leadership
• Influencing without authority
• Strong vendor and partner management
• Clear communication with business and technology executives
  

The anticipated base salary for this position is $220,800-$270,000. This role may also qualify for annual incentive and/or comprehensive benefits. The actual base salary offered will depend on a variety of factors, including without limitation, the qualifications of the individual applicant for the position, years of relevant experience, level of education attained, certifications or other professional licenses held, and if applicable, the location of the position.

Sony Pictures Entertainment is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, or other protected characteristics.

SPE will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records in accordance with applicable law.

Sony Pictures does not allow audio recording, video recording or use of AI note-taking tools during interviews. Please be aware these tools may be enabled as a default and can be difficult to disable once the interview has started, so we recommend you check your device and disable these tools prior to the start of your interview. If recording or the use of the tools occurs during the interview and cannot be promptly turned off or disabled, the interviewer may end the interview.

To request an accommodation for purposes of participating in the hiring process, you may contact us at SPE_Accommodation_Assistance@spe.sony.com.