Director, AI Core Intelligence

About Our Team

Lenovo is building Quantum, a next-generation hybrid AI platform that spans Windows, Android, and cloud. As Director of Core Intelligence, you will lead the engineering teams responsible for the "AI brain" of the system - including agentic orchestration, reasoning, fused memory, RAG retrieval, perception models, recommendation systems, and model optimization.

You will own the intelligence substrate that powers every AI experience Lenovo ships across millions of devices. This is a hands-on engineering leadership role, combining deep technical understanding with the ability to operate across multiple layers of the AI stack.

Location: Chicago, IL or Morrisville, NC is highly preferred. Remote work in the US is an option with travel.

What You'll Do

* Build and lead the Core Intelligence organization, owning agentic systems, orchestration, routing, tool frameworks, RAG retrieval, memory, knowledge graph, and perception signals.

* Architect the intelligence layer for hybrid AI: on-device inference, cloud fallback, multi-model routing, policy enforcement, and context grounding.

* Drive the development of perception-based triggers, wake-word detection logic, screenshot and audio understanding, OCR/ASR pipelines.

* Own the recommendation and next-action engines, working closely with Experience Engineering to deliver contextual, proactive AI.

* Lead the optimization of small and medium models (SLMs): quantization, distillation, pruning, and device-specific tuning.

* Partner closely with Platform Engineering, Cloud Platform, SRE & Delivery, and Experience teams to ensure Core Intelligence is performant, reliable, and tightly integrated.

* Define evaluation frameworks and quality gates for intelligence features such as retrieval accuracy, hallucination avoidance, model grounding, and agent reliability.

* Set the technical direction for the intelligence roadmap, balancing innovation, prototyping, and production reliability.

* Mentor senior ICs across perception, agentic systems, RAG, memory, and model optimization.

* Collaborate with research, product, and design teams to bring new agent capabilities and multimodal experiences to life.

Basic Qualifications

* 12+ years of engineering experience with at least 5 years leading teams in AI/ML systems, agent platforms, search, recommendation, or applied ML infrastructure.

* Hands-on experience with orchestration frameworks, agentic systems, LLM/SLM pipelines, RAG systems, embeddings, and memory architectures.

* Strong technical depth in at least one of: perception models (OCR/ASR/vision), retrieval systems, reinforcement learning, model optimization, distributed systems.

* Experience building systems that run across device + cloud in hybrid or edge environments.

Preferred Qualifications

* Demonstrated ability to lead senior ICs, set technical direction, and deliver complex AI systems at scale.

* Strong collaboration skills across platform teams, cloud engineering, UX/experience engineering, and SRE organizations.

* Ability to thrive in fast-paced, evolving environments and shape the engineering culture for a new AI platform.

* 25% global travel ability

The base salary budgeted range for this position is $220K - $320K. Individuals may also be considered for bonus and/or commission.