Head of AI Platforms

The Role

This is not a conventional infrastructure leadership position.

The Head of AI Platforms will build and lead the foundational platform layer that makes IHG’s AI ambitions possible at enterprise scale. While the AI Solutions Delivery and Product Management teams define what gets built and how it gets delivered, this role defines what everything runs on — and ensures that foundation is secure, observable, cost-efficient, and built to scale across IHG’s entire technology organization.

You will lead a focused team of engineers responsible for the platforms, shared capabilities, and governance frameworks that underpin every AI initiative IHG undertakes. Your work is not downstream of the AI roadmap — it is the infrastructure that makes the roadmap real. Without a world-class AI platform, even the best models and the best product ideas stall at the edge of production.

As a peer to the Head of Strategic AI Solutions Delivery and the Head of AI Product Management, you will sit at the center of IHG’s AI leadership triad — representing the platform perspective in every major architectural, investment, and delivery decision the organization makes.

Your Operating Model — Platform as a Strategic Asset

Enterprise-Grade, AI-Native

You will design and operate a platform organization that serves not just the AI team, but the full IHG enterprise. Every capability you build — from identity and access management to agent governance to LLM cost controls — will be designed to scale horizontally across business domains, geographies, and delivery teams. You are building a platform for the company, not a team-specific utility.

Small Team, Outsized Leverage

Your team is intentionally lean — a concentrated group of platform engineers who build capabilities that multiply the effectiveness of every engineer, every AI agent, and every product squad that depends on them. The measure of your team’s success is not headcount — it is how many delivery teams can move faster because of the foundation you’ve built.

Platform as an Enabling Partnership

You will operate as a proactive partner to the Solutions Delivery and Product Management organizations — not as a gatekeeper or a shared services queue. You will anticipate their platform needs before they become blockers, establish clear self-service patterns wherever possible, and build the governance guardrails that let delivery teams move fast without accumulating risk.

What You’ll Drive

• Own and execute the AI Platform strategy — defining the multi-year roadmap for IHG’s AI infrastructure, shared capabilities, and governance frameworks. Ensure the platform roadmap is aligned to enterprise technology strategy and actively anticipates the needs of AI delivery teams across the organization.

• Lead Platform Strategy and Architecture — establishing the architectural principles, patterns, and standards that govern how AI systems are built, deployed, and operated across IHG. Own the reference architecture for AI platform components and drive adoption across delivery teams.

• Build and operate Cross-Cutting Capability enablement — including Identity and Access Management (IAM) for AI systems and agents, enterprise observability and monitoring frameworks, AI agent and integration governance, and shared data access and security controls. These capabilities are the connective tissue of IHG’s AI ecosystem.

• Own AI FinOps and cloud cost governance — accountable for the optimization and governance of IHG’s AI cloud and LLM infrastructure spend. Build the cost visibility, showback/chargeback frameworks, and optimization practices that ensure AI investment translates to measurable business value — not unchecked infrastructure growth.

• Establish and enforce AI security and compliance standards — partnering with IHG’s Information Security and Legal functions to define and implement the data privacy, model governance, and regulatory compliance frameworks that all AI systems must operate within. Ensure that security is designed in, not bolted on.

• Drive platform developer experience — building the self-service tooling, documentation, and internal developer platform (IDP) capabilities that enable AI delivery teams to provision, deploy, and operate AI systems with speed and confidence. Reduce friction in the path from prototype to production.

• Lead and grow a focused team of platform engineers — recruiting, developing, and retaining a high-caliber team of engineers who are motivated by leverage and impact. Build a culture of platform excellence, engineering rigor, and p