Director, Generative AI Experience Engineering (EMEA)

At AKQA (part of WPP), we believe in the imaginative application of art and science to create beautiful ideas, products and services. We are looking for a Director, Generative AI Experience Engineering to help define and deliver the next generation of AI-native customer experiences across commerce, content and customer interfaces for some of the world’s most ambitious brands. This role sits at the intersection of AI systems engineering, generative experience design and modern frontend architecture leadership. Based in a hybrid working environment, collaborating with global AKQA studios, you will work alongside some of the brightest minds in design, engineering and innovation, helping shape the future of AI-native experiences.

Responsibilities

Lead design and architecture of AI-native experience platforms; Remain hands-on with engineering teams, contributing to prototypes, proof-of-concepts and production acceleration; Manage and mentor a team of developers; Build and shape AI-native customer experiences driven by intent, contextual generation, retrieval and adaptive orchestration; Work across modern LLM ecosystems including foundation models, retrieval pipelines, vector storage, embeddings, multi-agent systems and AI observability tooling; Design systems supporting conversational rendering, dynamic content assembly, streaming UX and adaptive interfaces; Work directly with senior client stakeholders to shape AI transformation conversations, technical strategy and engineering roadmaps; Lead discovery sessions, workshops and architecture discussions; Act as engineering authority within client engagements; Lead rapid proof-of-concepts, innovation initiatives and production acceleration; Drive AI-augmented engineering methodologies and continuously improve engineering processes, tooling and technical standards

Requirements

Strong experience across modern frontend engineering and AI-native architecture; Advanced React and Next.js architecture; Server Components, streaming UX and edge rendering; Component systems and frontend orchestration; Experience across modern AI ecosystems including OpenAI, Gemini, Claude and OSS models; RAG pipelines, vector databases, embeddings and chunking; Tool calling, agentic systems, orchestration and memory frameworks; Prompt engineering, prompt management and context engineering; AI observability, evaluations, governance and guardrails; AI-assisted development tooling including Claude Code, Cursor and Codex; Prompt-driven engineering and AI pair-programming workflows; Vercel & GCP preferred, with AWS and Azure also considered; Serverless and edge infrastructure; AI workload deployment and optimisation; CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code; REST and GraphQL APIs; Microservices and MACH architectures; CMS, DXPs and MarTech ecosystems; Strong engineering or development background with deep frontend architecture capability; Naturally curious and experimental mindset; Comfortable operating as both a technical architect and client-facing advisor; Low ego, collaborative and delivery-focused; Systems thinker; Proactive, resilient and comfortable with rapid experimentation; Excellent communication skills; Passionate about emerging technologies

Nice to have

Vercel & GCP preferred; AWS and Azure also considered