VP of AI Platform
Zuora · Foster City, California, United States
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, we believe the opportunity extends well beyond adding AI capabilities to existing products. It requires rethinking the underlying platforms, architecture, data foundations, and technical capabilities that enable intelligent systems to understand context, reason, take action, and deliver business outcomes. Zuora is investing in this transformation with the ambition to build a more intelligent, connected, and adaptable technology platform—one that accelerates product innovation, creates new customer value, and enables the company to operate with greater speed and efficiency. We are looking for a Vice President of AI Platform to help define and build that foundation. This leader will bring together deep technical expertise, platform strategy, and an entrepreneurial mindset to establish the capabilities that make AI-native product experiences possible across Zuora.
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.
This is not simply a role focused on integrating large language models or deploying AI infrastructure. It is an opportunity to determine what the company needs to build, what it should leverage from the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem, and how to create a scalable platform that enables product teams to innovate quickly without fragmenting the architecture or duplicating foundational capabilities.
The successful candidate will work across Product, Engineering, Data, Security, and other technology leaders to establish the platform required to support AI-powered workflows, intelligent automation, and agentic experiences. They will translate an ambitious AI-native vision into a practical technical strategy, making thoughtful choices about architecture, investment, build-versus-buy decisions, and the capabilities that will differentiate Zuora. The mandate is both strategic and hands-on: establish the direction, build the foundational capabilities, and help the organization move from experimentation to production at scale.
Role & Responsibilities
Define the AI Platform Strategy and Architecture
- Develop the vision, strategy, and technical architecture for Zuora’s AI platform, aligned with the company’s broader AI-native transformation.
- Determine the foundational capabilities required to support AI-powered products, intelligent workflows, and agentic applications across the portfolio.
- Establish a coherent platform architecture that enables reuse, interoperability, extensibility, and rapid innovation across product teams.
- Make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions, leveraging external models, services, and infrastructure where appropriate while investing in capabilities that create strategic differentiation.
- Establish a roadmap that balances near-term product opportunities with the long-term platform capabilities required to support the company’s evolution.
Build the Foundations for AI-Native Products
- Develop shared capabilities that enable product teams to incorporate AI into customer experiences and business workflows without rebuilding foundational infrastructure for each use case.
- Establish the technical foundations for AI agents that can understand user intent, access relevant context, reason through tasks, interact with enterprise systems, and take appropriate 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 accelerate experimentation and reduce the time required to move AI capabilities from prototype to production.
- Ensure the platform supports both conventional AI-enabled experiences and more autonomous, multi-step agentic workflows as the technology matures.
Establish Enterprise-Grade AI Infrastructure and Governance
- Build a secure, reliable, and scalable platform that meets the requirements of enterprise customers and mission-critical business workflows.
- Establish standards for model evaluation, testing, observability, performance, and continuous improvement.
- Develop approaches to managing AI quality, latency, availability, and cost, including appropriate model selection and routing.
- Partner with Security, Legal, Privacy, and Compliance teams to establish appropriate controls for data access, model usage, agent permissions, and execution.
- Ensure that AI systems operate within defined authorization boundaries, with appropriate safeguards, traceability, and human oversight for consequential actions.
- Establish mechanisms to monitor production performance, identify failures, evaluate outcomes, and improve system behavior over time.
Drive Technical and Business Outcomes
- Translate platform investments into measurable business and customer outcomes, including faster product development, improved customer experiences, increased automation, and more efficient operations.
- Establish clear measures of platform adoption, developer productivity, reliability, AI quality, cost efficiency, and time to production.
- Prioritize platform investments based on business impact and the capabilities they unlock for multiple product teams.
- Ensure the platform evolves in response to advances in AI technology, emerging customer needs, and lessons from production deployments.
- Communicate architectural decisions, investment priorities, trade-offs, and progress clearly to executive leadership.
What Success Looks Like
The VP of AI Platform will be successful when Zuora has established a coherent, secure, and scalable AI foundation that materially accelerates the company’s transition to AI-native products and operating models. Success will be reflected in:
- 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 levels of reliability, quality, security, observability, and cost control.
- Agentic capabilities: Zuora can build experiences that move beyond answering questions to executing meaningful business workflows within defined permissions.
- Platform adoption: Shared AI capabilities are used across product teams, reducing duplication and accelerating delivery.
- Customer and business value: Platform investments translate into more useful products, greater automation, and measurable improvements in customer and employee outcomes.
- A scalable technical foundation: The architecture can evolve as models, agent frameworks, and AI infrastructure continue to change.
- Organizational alignment: Product, Engineering, Data, and Security teams operate with a shared understanding of the platform strategy and how to build on it.
About You
We are looking for a technology leader who can build the AI platform that makes Zuora’s transformation real, turning rapidly evolving AI capabilities into secure, reusable, enterprise-grade foundations that enable our products to understand intent, execute workflows, and deliver business outcomes.
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. Strong understanding of modern AI architectures and the infrastructure required to support production-grade AI applications.
- Familiarity with large language models, model serving and orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings,