Director customer development lead automotive

Company

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Job Area

Engineering Group, Engineering Group > Machine Learning Engineering

General Summary

Job Overview

Qualcomm is seeking a Director – AI Customer Development Lead to provide technical and execution leadership for AI model onboarding, feature development, and Proof‑of‑Concept (PoC) delivery for automotive customers.

The AI Customer development team develops, onboards, optimizes, validates, and enables AI solutions for customer delivery. This role is a hands‑on Director leadership position. The successful candidate will define technical direction, workflows, and execution standards, lead complex cross‑team efforts spanning AISW, AI toolchains, and platforms, and ensure delivery of validated, customer‑ready AI solutions.

The AI Customer Development Lead operates with significant autonomy, represents customer-specific AI development in executive‑level forums, and is expected to influence strategy, tooling, and developer experience across Qualcomm Automotive AI.

Key Responsibilities

Principal‑Level Technical Leadership

• Act as the technical authority for AI model onboarding, feature development, and optimization for automotive customers.
• Lead complex efforts involving model bring‑up, debugging, quantization, performance tuning, and accuracy optimization across Qualcomm Automotive platforms.
• Drive architectural and technical decisions that balance customer needs, platform constraints, scalability, and long‑term maintainability.
• Personally lead or review technically complex and high‑risk customer engagements and escalations.

Execution Ownership & Workflow Definition

• Define, standardize, and continuously evolve customer development workflows for:
  • Model onboarding
  • Feature development
  • Validation and qualification
  • Customer readiness
    
• Own execution quality across customer requests (CRs) and feature requests (FRs), including prioritization, technical planning, and delivery.
• Ensure predictable, high‑quality outcomes across multiple concurrent customer programs.

Team & Resource Leadership

• Provide technical leadership to a globally distributed team composed of AI engineers
• Influence staffing, skill development, and pod composition to match evolving technical and customer demands.
• Mentor senior and mid‑level engineers, raising the overall technical bar of the organization.

Cross‑Functional & Cross‑Org Coordination

• Drive coordination across AI tools and platform teams, working closely with Product Management.
• Ensure fixes and enhancements are mainlined, validated, and customer‑ready.
• Partner with frontline Customer Engineering (CE) teams, which own final delivery to customers, to ensure seamless handoff and enablement.

Developer Experience, Documentation & Tooling

• Serve as a champion for developer experience across all customer engineering outputs.
• Own and standardize:
  • Model onboarding guides
  • Optimization and tuning documentation
  • Platform setup and execution flows
  • AI Hub execution and validation materials
    
• Drive the strategic transition from notebook‑based workflows to AI Hub‑based onboarding, aligned with Qualcomm’s long‑term AI enablement strategy.

Program Representation & Executive Engagement

• Represent customer AI development in program reviews, engineering forums, and executive‑level escalations.
• Communicate complex technical issues clearly to senior leadership, including risks, trade‑offs, and mitigation strategies.
• Influence roadmap and investment decisions through data‑driven technical insight.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 8+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience.

OR

Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 7+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience.

OR

PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 6+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience.

Preferred Qualifications

15+ years of industry experience , including:

• Deep, hands‑on experience in AI/ML model onboarding, optimization, and deployment, preferably in Automotive, Embedded, Mobile, or AI Systems.
• Proven Principal‑level technical leadership in complex HW/SW systems.
• Strong background in ML inference pipelines, quantization methods, performance/accuracy trade‑offs, and hardware accelerators.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross‑functional efforts without direct authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience influencing senior technical and executive stakeholders.
• Extensive experience with Qualcomm AI technologies (QNN, AIMET, Genie, AI Hub).
• Automotive AI experience across ADAS, VLM, LLM, perception, and multimodal systems.
• Track record of delivering customer‑facing PoCs and reference implementations.
• Experience defining developer workflows, tooling, and documentation standards at scale.
• Prior experience leading globally distributed engineering teams.
• Familiarity with automotive compliance and restricted‑code environments.

Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer. If you are an individual with a disability and need an accommodation during the application/hiring process, rest assured that Qualcomm is committed to providing an accessible process. You may e-mail [email protected] or call Qualcomm's toll-free number found here. Upon request, Qualcomm will provide reasonable accommodations to support individuals with disabilities to be able participate in the hiring process. Qualcomm is also committed to making our workplace accessible for individuals with disabilities. (Keep in mind that this email address is used to provide reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. We will not respond here to requests for updates on applications or resume inquiries).

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EEO Employer: Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer; all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or any other protected classification.

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Pay Range And Other Compensation & Benefits

$218,400.00 - $327,600.00

The above pay scale reflects the broad, minimum to maximum, pay scale for this job code for the location for which it has been posted. Even more importantly, please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Qualcomm. We also offer a competitive annual discretionary bonus program and opportunity for annual RSU grants (employees on sales-incentive plans are not eligible for our annual bonus). In addition, our highly competitive benefits package is designed to support your success at work, at home, and at play. Your recruiter will be happy to discuss all that Qualcomm has to offer – and you can review more details about our US benefits at this link.

If you would like more information about this role, please contact Qualcomm Careers.