Sr. Director, Enterprise Applications & Data Science (AI)

Job Description

The Company: GIA is the world’s foremost authority in gemology. GIA is a global organization with headquarters located in Carlsbad, CA. GIA in Carlsbad boasts a 17-acre ocean view campus that accommodates approximately 600 of its 3,000 total employees worldwide. It offers many competitive health and commuter benefits that promote the well-being of its employees as well as that of the environment. Click here to learn more about GIA!

The Location: Overlooking the iconic Flower Fields & Pacific Ocean, this position is located in Carlsbad, California at our corporate headquarters. 

The Environment:

• On-site cafe - affordable custom breakfast and lunch meals and Starbucks drinks!

• Economic friendly services - electric vehicle charging stations on-site

The Culture:  At GIA, our people are at the center of everything we do. We foster a culture of innovation, collaboration and curiosity, where teams learn from one another, celebrate successes and grow together while doing meaningful work with real impact.

We’re committed to creating an environment where everyone feels valued and inspired to contribute their best. That commitment extends to employee well-being, with robust benefits tailored by location, including medical insurance, retirement contributions, paid time off, life insurance and more.

Passionate people coming together with a shared purpose—that’s life at GIA.

What to expect:

• We offer competitive medical, dental, vision and matching 401-K plans (no vesting required)

• Paid vacation, sick and holidays, tuition assistance, commuter benefits

Position Overview

The Sr. Director, Enterprise Applications & Data Science (AI) is GIA's enterprise leader for agentic transformation, accountable for turning data and AI into measurable gains in speed, accuracy and cost across the Institute. The role owns the platforms, data and models that run GIA's core operations: Workday as the system of record for HCM, Financials, ERP, payroll and customer invoicing, and the Snowflake, Power BI and AWS AI ecosystem that powers enterprise analytics and machine learning. Reporting to the SVP, Chief Information & Transformation Officer, the role sets the enterprise applications, data and AI strategy and leads two teams through the Director, Business Systems and the Sr. Manager, Data Science & Analytics. It moves GIA from batch reporting and AI pilots to real-time analytics, production machine learning, including computer vision for laboratory grading, and AI agents that automate corporate and business processes worldwide. Through this work, the role strengthens the operational integrity and efficiency behind GIA's mission to ensure the public trust in gems and jewelry.

• Sets the enterprise applications, data and AI strategy and maintains a rolling 2–3-year roadmap aligned to the CITO's transformation agenda.

• Leads GIA's agentic transformation, defining the operating model in which AI agents execute and orchestrate corporate and business processes across Workday, Snowflake, AWS and Microsoft 365.

• Defines the reference architecture for agent development (Claude, Amazon Bedrock, tool integrations, human-in-the-loop controls) with the CISO and Enterprise Architecture.

• Partners with Finance, Payroll, HR, Laboratory, Education and Operations leaders to redesign and automate order-to-cash, record-to-report, procure-to-pay, hire-to-retire, and laboratory and customer operations processes.

• Builds and prioritizes the agent and automation portfolio against business cases, and owns the benefits ledger (hours returned, cycle time, error rates, cost avoided).
• Drives adoption and change management so automated processes and AI tools become standard practice, not pilots

Workday & Enterprise Applications (25%)

• Owns Workday as GIA's system of record for HCM, Financials, Adaptive Planning, Learning and ERP, including roadmap, tenant management, business process configuration, integrations and support.

• Establishes Workday as the source of all customer invoicing and the system of record for accounts receivable, leading process design, data migration, integrations and cutover with Finance.

• Delivers multi-country payroll through Workday HCM integration with ADP, including, data accuracy and pay-cycle controls.

• Partners with Finance on Adaptive Planning and HR on Workday Learning; integrates travel and expense platforms with Workday.

• Manages Workday's two annual feature releases and deploys Workday's native AI and agent capabilities alongside custom agents.
• Owns reporting and integrations, including data flows between Workday, Snowflake, ADP, and laboratory and business systems

Data Science, AI & Real-Time Analytics (25%)

• Builds GIA's modern data platform on Snowflake and AWS (data lake and enterprise data warehouse) as the single trusted source for enterprise reporting.

• Moves GIA from scheduled batch reports to real-time pipelines, live dashboards for Laboratory, Education, Finance & Operations.

• Automates enterprise reporting in Power BI, then shifts to Claude-driven conversational and agentic analytics that retire manual report production.

• Directs production machine learning and AI, including computer vision for laboratory grading and supervised models, on AWS SageMaker and Bedrock.
• Establishes MLOps standards for model versioning, monitoring, drift detection and retraining across all production models.

Team Leadership & Talent (10%)

• Leads the Director, Business Systems and the Sr. Manager, Data Science & Analytics, and builds a high-performing applications, data and AI organization.

• Recruits and develops talent in data engineering, data science, ML engineering, agent development and Workday, including delivery capacity in GIA Services (India).

• Sets team objectives, manages performance, and builds career paths and a culture of experimentation and accountability.
• Manages strategic partners and vendors, including Workday, Snowflake, Dell Boomi and implementation partners.

Governance, Risk, Controls & Budget (10%)

• Operationalizes AI governance for models and agents (responsible AI, guardrails, model risk) with the AI Task Force and the CISO.

• Maintains IT General Controls, role-based security and segregation of duties across Workday and financial systems, and keeps them audit ready.

• Establishes data governance, data quality, lineage and master data standards, and partners with Data Privacy to protect personal and customer data.
• Manages the enterprise applications, data and AI budget, including licenses and partner spend.

Job Competencies

• Strategic Vision: Sets a multi-year enterprise applications, data and AI strategy and translates the CITO's transformation agenda into a sequenced roadmap with measurable outcomes.

• AI & Agentic Leadership: Knows where agents, LLMs and traditional machine learning create value or risk, and moves AI from experiment to governed production at scale.

• Drive for Results: Holds self and teams accountable for measurable business outcomes and delivers complex, multi-year programs on time and on budget.

• Decision Quality: Makes sound, timely decisions in a complex, global, multi-system environment, weighing value, cost, risk and controls with a high degree of autonomy.

• Business & Financial Acumen: Brings expert knowledge of end-to-end finance and HR processes and builds credible business cases for the applications, data and AI portfolio.

• Optimize Talent: Builds and retains high-performing technical teams, develops the leaders below the role, and plans for succession across the US and India.

• Change Leadership: Leads enterprise-wide adoption of new processes and tools so automation and AI become standard practice, not pilots.
• Communication & Influence: Influences senior executives and business leaders without direct authority and explains complex technical topics in plain business terms.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, data science, statistics, engineering, or a related quantitative field.
• Master's degree in Data Science or MBA is highly desired.
• 15+ years of progressive experience across enterprise applications, data, and analytics, including 10+ years leading managers and multi-disciplinary teams.
• Proven record of building and scaling high-performing data science and analytics teams.
• Experience leading Workday HCM, Financials, Adaptive Planning, and Learning, with a strong understanding of end-to-end finance processes.
• Experience with Snowflake, building data lakes and data warehouses, and automating reporting in Power BI.
• Experience delivering real-time analytics and streaming data pipelines at enterprise scale.
• Hands-on background in traditional machine learning and AI, including computer vision, decision trees, and random forests.
• Experience building AI agents and AI automation highly desired, including automated reporting with Claude or comparable LLM platforms.
• Experience with the AWS AI ecosystem, including SageMaker and Bedrock, highly desired.

Additional Requirements

• Position is located in Carlsbad, CA.
• Domestic and international travel as needed, including to GIA Services (India) and laboratory locations.
• Periodic early-morning or evening meetings to overlap with GIA Services (India).

Salary range: $210,000–$260,000

An Equal Opportunity Employer
All employment decisions are made without regard to unlawful considerations of race, sex, religion, national origin, age, disability, or any other legally protected status. Reasonable accommodations are available upon request.

Disclaimer: This job description indicates in general terms, the type and level of work performed as well as the typical responsibilities of employees in this classification and it may be changed by management at any time. Other duties may also apply. Nothing in this job description changes the at-will employment relationship existing between the Company and its employees.