Director, AI Changemaker - People & Culture

About this role

About Us

SharkNinja is a global product design and technology company, with a diversified portfolio of 5-star rated lifestyle solutions that positively impact people’s lives in homes around the world. Powered by two trusted, global brands, Shark and Ninja , the company has a proven track record of bringing disruptive innovation to market and developing one consumer product after another has allowed SharkNinja to enter multiple product categories, driving significant growth and market share gains. Headquartered in Needham, Massachusetts with more than 4,100 associates, the company’s products are sold at key retailers, online and offline, and through distributors around the world.

AI at SharkNinja

At SharkNinja, we’re building an AI-native culture. We’re not waiting for the future; we’re creating it. Our people are expected to experiment boldly, adopt new tools, and continuously raise what’s possible to create meaningful impact for our consumers. If you believe the best way to do your job hasn’t been invented yet, you’ll fit right in.

Director, AI Changemaker — People & Culture

Reports to: VP, Chief of Staff to the CEO

Dotted Line: EVP, Chief People Officer

The Role

The Director, AI Change Maker is a high-impact, strategic / doer role at the intersection of People and Culture. The successful Director, AI Change Maker, People & Culture will operate as a player/coach, co-leading both the strategy and the hands-on project management execution of AI integration and work reimagination across SharkNinja – from hire to retire, service delivery, and enterprise storytelling – and will be the connective tissue that carries AI forward in our ways of working in all areas of the company

You will build the data foundation, deploy AI capabilities, and transform workflows so that SharkNinja’s People & Culture organization operates faster, smarter, and delivers greater impact enterprise-wide.

The Director, AI Change Maker carries a dual mandate: drive the current portfolio of AI initiatives to measurable completion, and partner directly with P&C leadership to shape what comes next. You do more than just deliver a fixed list of projects. You are here to build the AI capability and solutions that transform how People & Culture (P&C) works -- today and in the future. You will be measured on adoption, speed, and measurable business impact. You report directly to the VP, Chief of Staff to the CEO, with a dotted line to both the Chief People Officer.

What You Will Do

AI led Org Transformation

• Co-own the AI transformation roadmap across the full P&C function, identifying overlaps, dependencies, and consolidation opportunities

• Deploy work-reimagination and skills-mapping platforms to enable smarter workforce deployment across P&C and the enterprise

• Build and scale AI coaching tool for managers, enabling always-on development support, real-time feedback, and career pathing at a fraction of the cost of external coaching tools

• Build enterprise AI capability programs, run cross-functional sprints, and embed new ways of working at scale -- serving as the connective tissue between P&C and every other function's AI transformation

• Sequence and prioritize ruthlessly: act as PMO to drive each initiative to completion before starting the next, unless directed otherwise

• Leverage employee-first HR technology (e.g. Oracle, Greenhouse, Lattice)

Enterprise Storytelling

• Work with enterprise storytelling and communications teams to build AI-augmented content production models, shifting from fully human time-consuming workflows to a majority-AI speed and high quality production model

• Build agents and AI-powered workflows that turn company moments into internal stories in near real time -- newsletters, town hall recaps, and internal posts drafted and published in hours, not days

Talent Access (Hiring) & Service Delivery

• Deploy AI agents, automations, and workflows that augment service-level tasks across P&C -- scheduling, sourcing, onboarding, content production, information gathering and sharing

• Accelerate candidate sourcing and scheduling through AI agents, compressing time-to-fill and widening the funnel while reducing coordinator dependency

• Shift P&C to a customer-centric service delivery model with easily accessible key information (e.g. benefits, retirement, policy, personal info, manager tools, etc.)

Team Building & Change Management

• Drive hands-on AI adoption into the P&C organization

• Change work for the future, not just execute on change management

• Drive change management across large, global workforces with varying levels of AI fluency

• Translate complex AI capabilities into practical, adoptable solutions

• Establish success metrics, track adoption, and report measurable outcomes to executive leadership

• Champion a culture of experimentation: fast iteration, learning from failure, and scaling what works

Who You Are

Required:

• 8+ years in AI/ML, HR transformation, talent operations, or technology-driven change management

• Strong technical fluency in AI/ML: you can evaluate tools, assess platforms, and hold your own with engineers and data scientists

• Deep understanding of enterprise HR operations (talent access, talent experience, HR service delivery, people analytics) and how AI reshapes HR work

• Proven track record leading large-scale transformation in complex, multi-stakeholder environments

• Ability to bridge technical and business: you can tell IT what to build and tell HR leadership what outcome it delivers

• Decisive, action-oriented, and comfortable in ambiguity where speed matters more than perfection

Strongly Preferred:

• Experience deploying AI across HR or talent functions at scale, not just pilots

• Experience producing AI prototypes from proof-of-concept to enterprise-grade tools

• Familiarity with skills-based organization design, workforce reimagination platforms, or RPO/CLM-style vendor models

Additional Requirements:

• Some trav

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