Founded in 2012, H2O.ai is on a mission to democratize AI. As the world’s leading agentic AI company, H2O.ai converges Generative and Predictive AI to help enterprises and public sector agencies develop purpose-built GenAI applications on their private data. With a focus on Sovereign AI—secure, compliant, and infrastructure-flexible deployments—H2O.ai delivers solutions that align with the highest standards of data privacy and control.

Our open-source technology is trusted by over 20,000 organizations worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune 500. H2O.ai powers AI transformation for companies like AT&T, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Chipotle, Workday, Progressive Insurance, and NIH.

H2O.ai partners include NVIDIA, Dell Technologies, Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY), Snowflake, AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), VAST Data and MinIO. H2O.ai’s AI for Good program supports nonprofit groups, foundations, and communities in advancing education, healthcare, and environmental conservation. With a vibrant community of 2 million data scientists worldwide, H2O.ai aims to co-create valuable AI applications for all users.

H2O.ai has raised $256 million from investors, including Commonwealth Bank, NVIDIA, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Capital One, Nexus Ventures and New York Life.

For more information, visit www.h2o.ai

About This Opportunity

We are seeking a highly technical, hands-on Vice President of Engineering based in Sri Lanka to lead and scale our Asia-Pacific engineering organization spanning India, Singapore, and Sydney. You will own engineering execution for product roadmaps defined in collaboration with our global teams, drive customer-facing technical engagements across the region, build a world-class distributed engineering culture and actively contribute to architecture and code. You will lead from the front – shaping strategy while remaining close to the product.

This is not a pure people-management role. You must be comfortable reviewing pull requests, developing code, and driving architectural decisions while building and mentoring high-performing teams. You have the ability to operate across time zones, execute the global strategy across the region, and maintain high engineering velocity without compromising quality.

This position is based in Sri Lanka.

What You Will Do
Engineering Leadership & Delivery

• Own end-to-end engineering execution across our Sri Lanka, India, Singapore, and Sydney teams.
• Translate product roadmaps set by leadership into quarterly plans and sprint commitments.
• Ensure on-time, high-quality delivery of platform features, enterprise integrations, and customer-specific solutions.
• Establish and maintain engineering KPIs: velocity, quality, reliability, and developer productivity.
• Contribute directly to code development and uphold high quality standards.

Customer & Field Engineering Support

• Partner with APAC Sales, Solutions Engineering, and Customer Success to support enterprise customers in the region.
• Act as the senior technical escalation point for customer engagements, POCs, and production deployments.
• Ensure engineering responsiveness to customer-reported issues, feature requests, and SLA commitments.
• Represent H2O.ai's technical capabilities in executive-level customer meetings.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Operate as the primary engineering counterpart to Product and Engineering leadership across all regions.
• Participate in global roadmap planning, architecture reviews, and release coordination.
• Manage the time-zone handoff model — ensuring "follow-the-sun" development cadence and minimal context loss across regions.
• Drive alignment on technical standards, coding practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure across all sites.

Talent & Organization Building

• Recruit, retain, and develop top engineering talent across Sri Lanka, India, Singapore, and Australia.
• Build a strong engineering leadership bench — coach and develop Engineering Managers and Principal Engineers.
• Foster a high-performance, inclusive engineering culture rooted in ownership, transparency, and continuous improvement.
• Manage workforce planning, headcount budgeting, and organizational design for the APAC engineering team

Technical Strategy

• Contribute to architectural decisions for H2O's AI/ML platforms, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise product suite.
• Champion engineering excellence: code quality, testing, observability, security, and scalability.
• Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions and technology choices relevant to the APAC engineering portfolio.
• Drive adoption of modern engineering practices (platform engineering, MLOps, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code).

• 15+ years in software engineering with 8+ years in senior engineering leadership (Director/VP level).
• Proven track record managing distributed, multi-site engineering teams across at least 3 geographies.
• Deep experience with AI/ML platforms, cloud-native SaaS, or enterprise data infrastructure.
• Strong background in Java, Python, or Go with familiarity across the modern data/ML stack (Kubernetes, Spark, TensorFlow/PyTorch, cloud platforms).
• Experience operating as a bridge between HQ strategy and regional execution in a global product company.
• Demonstrated ability to support enterprise customers technically at the VP/CTO level.
• Excellent communication skills — able to influence across cultures, time zones, and organizational levels.
• BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience

Strongly Preferred

• Experience at an AI/ML-focused product company or in building ML platform / MLOps tooling.
• Familiarity with H2O.ai's product ecosystem (H2O-3, Driverless AI, H2O Wave, h2oGPT) or comparable open-source/enterprise AI platforms.
• Prior experience managing teams in India and/or Australia.
• Experience with open-source community engagement and developer ecosystem growth.
• MBA or business leadership training is a plus.

Preferred Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• Experience with LLM/GenAI engineering — fine-tuning, RAG architectures, inference optimization, and GPU infrastructure management.
• Track record of building engineering centers of excellence or scaling teams in Sri Lanka and/or South Asia.
• Experience working with regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, government) in the APAC region.
• Exposure to open-source community management and developer relations.

• Market leader in total rewards
• Remote-friendly culture
• Flexible working environment
• Be part of a world-class team
• Executive career growth

H2O.ai is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive culture. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability status or any other legally protected basis.

H2O.ai is an innovative AI cloud platform company, leading the mission to democratize AI for everyone. Thousands of organizations from all over the world have used our cutting-edge technology across a variety of industries. We’ve made it easy for people at all levels to generate breakthrough solutions to complex business problems and advance the discovery of new ideas and revenue streams. We push the boundaries of what is possible with artificial intelligence. 

H2O.ai employs the world’s top Kaggle Grandmasters, the community of best-in-the-world machine learning practitioners and data scientists. A strong AI for Good ethos and responsible AI drive the company’s purpose.

Please visit www.H2O.ai to learn more.

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