Role Summary
Drive technology foresight, innovation, and incubation activities that strengthen SDS.AI’s future competitiveness and enable differentiated capabilities and offerings. The role converts emerging technology developments into pragmatic business opportunities, working across the enterprise and external ecosystem to move promising ideas from insight to scalable adoption.
Key Responsibilities
Technology Foresight & Strategic Direction
- Establish and continuously refresh technology roadmaps aligned to SDS.AI’s business strategy, growth priorities, and client needs.
- Monitor emerging technologies, AI, engineering, cloud, data, automation, and digital transformation trends; translate implications into clear strategic choices.
- Provide executive leadership with concise technology assessments, opportunity theses, and recommendations on build, buy, partner, or incubate decisions.
- Identify technology discontinuities, competitive threats, and adjacent opportunities that can materially influence future market positioning.
Innovation Portfolio & Incubation
- Design and lead an innovation pipeline that captures ideas, prioritizes investments, validates concepts, and advances viable initiatives through defined stage gates.
- Incubate new capabilities, accelerators, platforms, and technology-led offerings from concept through pilot, proof of value, and transition to business ownership.
- Set success criteria, resourcing needs, risk controls, and commercialization pathways for innovation initiatives.
- Create a disciplined innovation operating model that balances exploration with measurable business impact and speed to market.
Capability & Offering Development
- Partner with business, delivery, sales, and solutioning leaders to convert validated concepts into differentiated capabilities and client-ready offerings.
- Define reusable assets, reference architectures, methods, and talent requirements needed to scale new capabilities.
- Support portfolio decisions by identifying where technology investments create a distinctive right to win.
- Champion adoption of new offerings internally and ensure feedback from clients and delivery teams informs their evolution.
Ecosystem & Thought Leadership
- Build purposeful relationships with startups, academia, hyperscalers, technology providers, and specialist partners to broaden SDS.AI’s innovation capacity.
- Lead technology scouting, joint exploration, and co-innovation activities with priority ecosystem partners.
- Represent SDS.AI in relevant technology forums and strengthen its credibility as a forward-looking AI, engineering, and digital partner.
- Foster a culture of curiosity, experimentation, knowledge sharing, and responsible innovation across the organization
Essential Experience & Qualifications
- Significant leadership experience in technology, innovation, engineering, AI, digital transformation, or a closely related field.
- Strong understanding of emerging technologies and the ability to assess their technical, commercial, and operational relevance.
- Demonstrated experience incubating new capabilities, offerings, products, or technology initiatives through to business adoption.
- Ability to translate technology trends into compelling business cases, investment priorities, and actionable roadmaps.
- Established ecosystem engagement across startups, academia, hyperscalers, and technology providers.
- Strong executive communication, influence, stakeholder management, and cross-functional leadership skills.
Ideal Candidate Profile
- Strategic technology leader who combines external foresight with practical delivery discipline.
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity, testing hypotheses, and making informed investment trade-offs.
- Commercially minded, collaborative, and able to connect technical possibilities with client and business value.
- Credible advisor to senior leaders and an energizing sponsor of innovation teams.