Director, AI Solution Delivery

***Please Note: This is a fully remote role; however, international travel is expected to collaborate with global R&D labs, business units, and pilot customers, and may reach 30 to 50% depending on project needs and incubation phase.***

About Lenovo CTO Org

Lenovo CTO Org is the cutting-edge R&D and technology incubation organization of Lenovo, dedicated to advancing information technology, smart devices, and services. Our mission is to turn breakthrough innovations into real businesses, powering Lenovo's most advanced products and services and shaping the future of AI, hybrid computing, edge technologies, and beyond.

About the Role

This is a leadership role at the heart of Lenovo CTO Org's Tech Incubation team, accountable for the end-to-end delivery of solutions across a portfolio of concurrent incubation projects. You will build, lead, and scale a multidisciplinary delivery organization as the portfolio evolves.

You will establish and scale a new Solution Delivery organization, creating the processes, operating model, and team required to support a growing incubation portfolio.

This is not a single-program management role. You will operate as the central orchestrator across multiple incubation projects - dynamically prioritizing resources, resolving cross-functional bottlenecks, and ensuring alignment between engineering, product, business development, and customer stakeholders. Success requires the ability to context-switch across projects, reallocate talent based on shifting priorities, and maintain delivery momentum in a dynamic environment.

Our incubation portfolio spans AI-driven products across smart manufacturing, full-stack AI agent solutions, robotics, sports technology, and other emerging domains. Each project moves at speed through the 01 journey - from concept validation and pilot deployment to repeatable commercial engagements.

Success is measured not only by delivering successful pilots, but by helping transform incubation projects into repeatable, scalable commercial solutions ready for transition into Lenovo business units.Your role is to ensure every solution is delivered with excellence, on time, and with the quality and scalability required to transition successfully to Lenovo's business units. You bring a customer-first, results-driven mindset to everything you do.

This is a US-based role operating within a global environment; international travel is expected to collaborate with R&D labs, pilot customers, and business units, and may range from approximately 30-50% depending on project needs and incubation phase.

Key Responsibilities:

Portfolio-Wide Solution Delivery Ownership

• Own the full solution delivery lifecycle across all active incubation projects - from initial architecture and resource planning through pilot deployment, customer validation, and handover to business units.
• Prioritize across a portfolio of projects rather than managing only one fixed program. Continuously assess project priority, risk, and strategic value to allocate delivery resources where they matter most.
• Define and enforce delivery standards, methodologies, and quality gates appropriate for early-stage, fast-moving environments without introducing unnecessary overhead.
• Establish delivery standards, deployment playbooks, and operating processes for the newly formed Solution Delivery organization.
• Establish clear delivery metrics and dashboards that provide real-time visibility into project health, risks, and resource utilization across the portfolio.
• Serve as the ultimate escalation point for delivery blockers, cross-functional conflicts, and critical customer-facing issues.

Cross-Project Orchestration & Resource Optimization

• Dynamically prioritize and allocate delivery resources across incubation projects based on strategic priority, customer commitments, and business milestones.
• Manage interdependencies between concurrent projects, ensuring knowledge, reusable components, and best practices are shared effectively.
• Partner with Product Managers to align delivery scope with roadmap timelines and incubation stage gates.
• Decompose complex delivery objectives into actionable workstreams; coordinate resources across teams and geographies to drive execution toward goals.

Customer & Stakeholder Alignment

• Own customer onboarding, adoption, satisfaction, and long-term success for deployed incubation solutions, ensuring pilot engagements deliver measurable business value and create pathways for expansion.
• Engage directly with strategic pilot customers and solution partners on delivery matters, ensuring commitments are met and customer satisfaction remains high.
• Act as the primary delivery interface to senior internal stakeholders, including CTO leadership, business unit heads, and R&D lab directors.
• Ensure seamless handover of successfully incubated solutions to business unit engineering and operations teams, including documentation, training, and transition planning.
• Help turn incubation projects into repeatable commercial solutions by capturing delivery insights and feeding them back to the solution R&D team.

Technical & Operational Excellence

• Provide architectural and technical oversight across software, hardware, and systems integration workstreams, ensuring solution coherence and feasibility.
• Champion operational best practices - including risk management, change control, configuration management, and field support processes - adapted for incubation speed.
• Identify and mitigate delivery risks early; drive root-cause analysis and corrective actions when issues arise.
• Proactively review and distill solution delivery experience into actionable feedback and optimization recommendations for both software and hardware components, and relay them to the solution R&D team in a timely manner.

Team Leadership & Development

• Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing delivery organization.
• Build and lead a multidisciplinary team spanning Technical Program Management, Customer Success, Solution Architecture, Systems Architecture, Field Implementation, and UX.
• Drive hiring, performance management, and career development to ensure the team evolves with the growing demands of the incubation portfolio.
• Coach and grow team members, fostering a culture of ownership, velocity, accountability, and continuous improvement within the delivery team.
• Resolve resource conflicts, mediate cross-functional disagreements, and create an environment where high-caliber talent thrives.

What We Look For:

• Customer-first orientation: You naturally measure success by customer outcomes.
• Results-driven execution: You drive teams toward clear goals, hold yourself and others accountable, and deliver measurable outcomes under ambiguity and time pressure.
• Builder mentality: You thrive in 01 dynamic environments and know how to create structure from chaos without over-engineering process.
• Portfolio thinking: You are comfortable constantly re-prioritizing across multiple workstreams that optimize for overall portfolio success rather than any single project.
• Technical breadth across software architecture, embedded systems, IoT, cloud/edge infrastructure, and AI/ML solutions - sufficient to engage credibly with architects and engineers during design reviews and technical decision-making.
• Track record of defining and enforcing delivery standards, methodologies, and quality gates appropriate for early-stage, fast-moving environments without introducing unnecessary overhead.
• Demonstrated experience in repeatable, scalable commercial solutions.
• Excellent task decomposition skills - ability to break complex delivery objectives into clear, executable plans and milestones.
• Strong resource planning and coordination skills - able to forecast capacity needs, optimize team utilization, and reallocate talent dynamically across competing priorities.
• Strong customer-facing and executive communication skills - able to present confidently to senior leadership, navigate complex stakeholder landscapes, and represent delivery at the executive level.
• Conflict management - skilled at resolving disagreements, mediating between competing interests, and maintaining productive relationships under pressure.
• Team coaching and development - demonstrated ability to coach, mentor, and grow talent, building bench strength and leadership pipelines within the organization.
• Proven leadership experience building and scaling multidisciplinary technical teams in fast-paced, innovation-driven environments.

Required Qualifications:

• 12+ years of experience in solution delivery, customer engineering, professional services, technical program management, engineering leadership, or related technology leadership roles within technology organizations.
• 5+ years in a people-leadership capacity managing multidisciplinary teams.
• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical field; advanced degree or MBA is a plus.
• Proven experience leading customer-facing solution delivery, customer success, professional services, customer engineering, implementation, or deployment organizations.
• Strong background in enterprise technology such as AI, edge computing, industrial solutions, systems integration, or emerging technologies.
• Proven experience delivering full-stack AI solutions in smart manufacturing, ideally with computer vision components.
• Proven track record delivering complex, customer-facing solutions that span software and hardware components - ideally in AI, robotics, edge computing, IoT, or adjacent emerging technology domains.
• Demonstrated experience managing concurrent projects or programs with competing priorities and dynamically shifting resource needs.
• Strong background in agile and phase-gate development methodologies, with experience adapting processes to fast-paced, innovation-driven environments.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience working within startups, corporate incubation, or venture-backed organizations highly preferred.
• Experience in sports technology and other emerging domains is a strong plus.
• Experience in AI agent solution delivery is also a plus.
• PMP, Agile/Scrum, or equivalent program management certification preferred.
• Exceptional communication, presentation, and executive engagement skills.
• Mandarin language proficiency is a plus.