VP of AI Platform

About Zuora:

Zuora is entering a new chapter in its evolution, with an opportunity to rethink how an established enterprise software company builds, delivers, and operates technology in an AI-native world.

As AI and agentic technologies reshape enterprise software, Zuora is investing in rethinking its underlying platforms, architecture, data foundations, and technical capabilities so that intelligent systems can understand context, reason, take action, and deliver business outcomes. We are looking for a Vice President of AI Platform to help define and build that foundation.

The Opportunity:

The VP of AI Platform will define and lead the strategy, architecture, and development of the shared AI platform capabilities that underpin Zuora's next generation of products and experiences. The role is both strategic and hands-on: establish the direction, build the foundational capabilities, and help the organization move from experimentation to production at scale.

Roles and Responsibilities:

Define the AI Platform Strategy and Architecture

• Develop the vision, strategy, and technical architecture for Zuora's AI platform.
• Determine the foundational capabilities required to support AI-powered products, intelligent workflows, and agentic applications.
• Establish a coherent platform architecture that enables reuse, interoperability, extensibility, and rapid innovation.
• Make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions.
• Establish a roadmap that balances near-term product opportunities with long-term platform capabilities.

Build the Foundations for AI-Native Products

• Develop shared capabilities that enable product teams to incorporate AI without rebuilding foundational infrastructure.
• Establish the technical foundations for AI agents that can understand intent, access context, reason through tasks, interact with enterprise systems, and take action.
• Define approaches to model integration and orchestration, context management, retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, and agent execution.
• Enable secure and reliable access to enterprise data, business logic, APIs, and transactional capabilities.
• Develop reusable patterns and services that reduce the time required to move AI capabilities from prototype to production.

Establish Enterprise-Grade AI Infrastructure and Governance

• Build a secure, reliable, and scalable platform that meets the requirements of enterprise customers and mission-critical workflows.
• Establish standards for model evaluation, testing, observability, performance, and continuous improvement.
• Manage AI quality, latency, availability, and cost, including model selection and routing.
• Partner with Security, Legal, Privacy, and Compliance teams to establish controls for data access, model usage, agent permissions, and execution.
• Ensure AI systems operate within defined authorization boundaries, with safeguards, traceability, and human oversight for consequential actions.

Drive Technical and Business Outcomes

• Translate platform investments into measurable business and customer outcomes.
• Establish clear measures of platform adoption, developer productivity, reliability, AI quality, cost efficiency, and time to production.
• Prioritize platform investments based on business impact.
• Communicate architectural decisions, investment priorities, trade-offs, and progress to executive leadership.

What Success Looks Like:

• Faster innovation: Product teams can develop, test, and deploy AI-powered capabilities without repeatedly building foundational infrastructure.
• Production-grade AI: AI applications operate with appropriate reliability, quality, security, observability, and cost control.
• Agentic capabilities: Zuora can build experiences that execute meaningful business workflows within defined permissions.
• Platform adoption: Shared AI capabilities are used across product teams, reducing duplication.
• Customer and business value: Platform investments translate into more useful products and greater automation.
• A scalable technical foundation: The architecture can evolve as models and AI infrastructure change.
• Organizational alignment: Product, Engineering, Data, and Security teams share an understanding of the platform strategy.

About You:

Deep Technical and Architectural Expertise

• A proven technology leader with significant experience building and scaling platforms, infrastructure, or distributed systems in complex enterprise software environments.
• Familiarity with large language models, model serving and orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector search, context engineering, and agentic application architectures.
• Experience designing systems that integrate AI capabilities with enterprise data, APIs, business logic, and transactional systems.
• Strong grounding in cloud architecture, distributed systems, security, reliability, and scalable software engineering.

An AI-Native Platform Mindset

• Understands that AI-native software requires more than adding a model or conversational interface to an existing application.
• Can identify which capabilities should be foundational platform services and which should remain product-specific.
• Understands the importance of context, permissions, data access, evaluation, observability, and reliability when moving AI into enterprise workflows.

A Builder Who Can Turn Strategy into Reality

• Has taken complex technical initiatives from concept through architecture, development, production deployment, and scaled adoption.
• Combines strategic thinking with the ability to engage deeply in technical decisions.
• Makes clear trade-offs between speed, flexibility, cost, reliability, and long-term architectural integrity.

Strong Product and Business Orientation

• Can connect platform architecture and investment decisions to customer value, product differentiation, developer productivity, and commercial impact.
• Works effectively with senior Product and Engineering leaders to identify the highest-value AI opportunities.

Enterprise Judgment and Leadership

• Has experience building technology that meets demanding requirements for security, privacy, reliability, and enterprise-scale operations.
• Communicates complex technical concepts clearly to technical teams, product leaders, and executives.
• Influences across organizational boundaries and attracts strong technical talent.

Comfortable Defining What Comes Next

• Is intellectually curious, adaptable, and energized by the pace of change in AI.
• Can separate genuine technical opportunities from hype and make sound decisions amid uncertainty.

About the Team:

Enable Product and Engineering Transformation

• Partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership to identify where shared AI platform capabilities can unlock customer value.
• Establish clear platform interfaces, development patterns, documentation, and tools that make AI capabilities accessible to product engineers.
• Reduce duplicated infrastructure, fragmented implementations, and unnecessary complexity across teams.
• Foster a culture of rapid experimentation, disciplined engineering, and learning from production outcomes.

Build and Lead a High-Impact Organization

• Build a high-caliber AI platform organization that combines technical depth, engineering judgment, and an outcome-oriented mindset.
• Attract and retain talent across AI infrastructure, platform engineering, distributed systems, and applied AI.
• Establish a culture of ownership, technical excellence, accountability, and pragmatic execution.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation, variable bonus and performance-based reward opportunities, and retirement programs
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Generous, flexible time off, plus paid holidays, wellness days, and a company-wide year-end break
• Paid parental leave (subject to local policy)
• Learning and development stipend
• Volunteer opportunities and charitable donation matching where available
• Mental wellbeing resources and support

*Benefits may vary by location; details will be shared during the interview process.

Equal Opportunity:

Zuora is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to creating an inclusive environment for all. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.