Director of AI

About the Opportunity

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Direct Travel is building artificial intelligence into how we operate and what we deliver to our clients. Our objective is what we call the perfect trip — a travel experience where intelligent systems anticipate needs and remove friction at every step. The Director of AI is instrumental to delivering this strategic vision and roadmap.

The central mandate is agentic. Leveraging our data foundation, you will enable intelligent agents to drive business processes end to end — establishing the AI platforms and frameworks the organization builds on, driving the engineering of the harnesses those agents operate within, and measuring rigorously whether they work.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will own an AI budget, a global team of full-time and contract engineers, and a vendor portfolio, while remaining active in architecture and design decisions. Technical credibility with the team you lead is essential.

What You Will Own

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Agentic AI & Intelligent Process Automation

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• Define and deliver the agentic AI strategy — intelligent agents operating on our consolidated data to drive business processes end to end.
• Drive the engineering of the harnesses these agents run inside — tool access, context management, control flow, error recovery, and guardrails — and set integration standards including the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A).
• Build the evaluation discipline that proves an agent works: automated evaluations, regression testing, and clear criteria for promoting from pilot to production.
• Define where humans stay in the loop, particularly where decisions carry financial and service consequences.

AI Platforms & Frameworks

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* Establish the AI platforms, frameworks, and reference architectures the organization builds on, so capability compounds rather than b