Director — FDE Office (Forward Deployed Engineering)
GlobalFoundries · Austin · $191,000–$332,000 (stated in the posting)
About GlobalFoundries:
GlobalFoundries is a leading full-service semiconductor foundry providing a unique combination of design, development, and fabrication services to some of the world’s most inspired technology companies. With a global manufacturing footprint spanning three continents, GlobalFoundries makes possible the technologies and systems that transform industries and give customers the power to shape their markets. For more information, visit www.gf.com.
Summary of Role:
GlobalFoundries is scaling the next generation of enterprise AI and agentic workflows through the CIO FDE Office. The Director leads a blended team of internal engineers, NCG resources, and contractor FDEs (partners) to incubate, industrialize, and operationalize AI-powered solutions across HR, IT, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, and other business domains. This is a supervisory role that combines people leadership, portfolio and demand management, architecture direction, executive engagement, and financial stewardship of the AI platform.
The Director sets the operating model and standards for a small, high-impact organization, ensures solutions ship with the right security, observability, governance, and cost controls, and serves as the CIO's trusted partner for translating enterprise AI strategy into delivered, measurable value. Roughly 70% of the role is strategy, leadership, and stakeholder engagement & management; ~30% is retained technical fluency and architecture judgment.
Essential Responsibilities:
1. Team Leadership & Talent Development
- Lead, coach, and develop the team 5 direct reports plus 5 NCG resources; build a durable talent pipeline and career paths within the pod.
- Manage a blended workforce of internal GF FDE engineers and contractor resources; scale capacity up and down as demand requires.
- Set the CIO FDE Office operating model, engineering standards, roles/responsibilities, and delivery methodology.
- Own staffing plans, investment proposals, and capability-building; foster a culture of ownership, safety, and measurable outcomes.
2. Portfolio, Intake Governance & Delivery
- Own the CIO FDE portfolio — prioritize use cases, sequence delivery, and align capacity to the highest-value opportunities.
- Run intake governance for new technology requests: apply formal intake templates and screening questions to ensure strategic alignment and reusable patterns.
- Drive use cases from incubation to production without surprises in risk, security, or cost; hold go/no-go and production-readiness gates.
- Represent solutions at Design Review Board (DRB) and enterprise architecture reviews.
3. Enterprise AI & Agentic Platform Strategy
- Set technical direction for enterprise AI agents built across various enterprise applications such as ServiceNow, Workday, SAP, Supply Chain, HR, and IT Operations.
- Guide architecture for MCP integrations, APIs, multi-agent orchestration, cloud (AWS / ADP BYOC), identity (Entra ID, OBO, token brokering), and observability.
- Champion reusable components, reference implementations, and standards that reduce delivery time for future use cases.
- Retain enough hands-on depth to pressure-test designs, make credible build-vs-buy decisions, and unblock the team on hard technical calls.
4. Cost, Budget & AI Tokenomics Stewardship
- Own budget accountability for the CIO FDE Office — platform licensing, SOWs/contracts (e.g., Redpanda ADP), contractor spend, and cloud/AI consumption.
- Build and maintain AI tokenomics visibility: showback/chargeback models across Copilot, Cowork, AWS Bedrock, GitHub Copilot, and other GenAI tools, with dashboards for leadership.
- Forecast AI/cloud consumption, model ROI and total cost of ownership, and drive cost transparency and spend governance for business units.
- Balance speed of incubation with disciplined cost control; make model, harness, and local-LLM trade-off decisions that optimize value per dollar.
5. Executive & Business Engagement
- Serve as the CIO's delivery partner and a trusted advisor to C-suite and business unit leaders (CEO/XT, CHRO,PO manufacturing and functional leadership).
- Translate business strategy into an agentic roadmap; run workshops to identify automation opportunities and secure sponsorship.
- Communicate status, decisions, risks, and value in concise, executive-level briefings, decision memos, and steering forums.
- Manage vendor and partner relationships, negotiate SOWs, and align external delivery to GF priorities and standards.
6. Production Readiness, Risk & Operations
- Ensure deployed agents meet enterprise bars for security, identity, data quality, observability, and production support.
- Oversee UAT, defect tracking, go/no-go criteria, and operational runbooks for agents entering production.
- Partner with platform, cloud, network, and security teams on scalability, resilience, and compliance (including SOX-relevant systems where applicable).
- Institutionalize telemetry and cost-aware operating practices across the agent lifecycle.
Other Responsibilities:
- Perform all activities in a safe and responsible manner and support all Environmental, Health, Safety & Security requirements and programs.
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field (advanced degree a plus).
- 12+ years of technology experience, including 5+ years leading engineering, delivery, or platform teams.
- Proven people-leadership track record: hiring, coaching, and scaling blended internal/contractor teams and early-career talent.
- Demonstrated ownership of budgets, licensing/SOWs, and technology cost governance.
- Strong architecture fluency across APIs, enterprise integration, cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP), and modern application development.
- Experience partnering with senior business and C-suite stakeholders to deliver measurable outcomes.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience delivering enterprise AI agents, MCP servers, LLM platforms, Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, LangGraph, CrewAI, or Redpanda ADP.
- Familiarity with AI tokenomics, showback/chargeback, and cloud FinOps for GenAI workloads.
- Experience with AWS, Azure and BYOC solutions. Hands on experience with cloud solutions preferred.
- Integration experience with ServiceNow, Workday, SAP, or Microsoft Graph APIs.
- Experience with enterprise architecture frameworks (TOGAF, APQC) and EA tooling (LeanIX, Bizzdesign).
- Comfortable leading in ambiguous, fast-moving incubation environments where requirements evolve through prototyping.
Success Measures — First 12 Months
Mature a durable CIO FDE operating model with clear roles, standards, and a healthy talent pipeline
Deliver production-ready agentic solutions for priority use cases across multiple business domains with no surprises in risk, security, or cost.
Establish AI tokenomics transparency — showback/chargeback dashboards and forecasts adopted by leadership and business units.
Reduce delivery time for new use cases through reusable MCPs, API assets, and reference patterns.
Earn trusted-advisor status with the CIO and C-suite, with a prioritized, sponsored agentic roadmap in flight.
Expected Salary Range
$191,000.00 - $332,000.00The exact Salary will be determined based on qualifications, experience and location.
If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please contact us by email at usaccommodations@gf.com and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. Requests for accommodation will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Please note that only inquiries concerning a request for reasonable accommodation will be responded to from this email address.
An offer with GlobalFoundries is conditioned upon the successful completion of pre-employment conditions, as applicable, and subject to applicable laws and regulations.
GlobalFoundries is fully committed to equal opportunity in the workplace and believes that cultural diversity within the company enhances its business potential. GlobalFoundries goal of excellence in business necessitates the attraction and retention of highly qualified people. Artificial barriers and stereotypic biases detract from this objective and may be illegally discriminatory.
All policies and processes which pertain to employees including recruitment, selection, training, utilization, promotion, compensation, benefits, extracurricular programs, and termination are created and implemented without regard to age, ethnicity, ancestry, color, marital status, medical condition, mental or physical disability, national origin, race, religion, political and/or third-party affiliation, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other characteristic or category specified by local, state or federal law