AI Infrastructure Expert - West Coast

Senior Director, Gartner Business And Technology Insights

Gartner Analysts are industry thought leaders who create must-have business and technology insights, market predictions, and best practices for a broad range of world-leading organizations. As a Senior Director, you will serve as an expert within Gartner's Business and Technology Insights (BTI) sector, establishing yourself as a credible voice within your designated market at local, regional, and global levels. Leveraging exceptional analytical skills, a Senior Director plays a significant role in producing pragmatic and provocative insights which Gartner clients use to propel their business toward key objectives. You will be a trusted source of advice for clients, reinforcing Gartner's value every day by engaging them via in-person meetings, virtual meetings, sales support visits, and Gartner conferences to discuss complex client challenges and offer actionable recommendations.

In this role, you will provide strategic guidance on AI infrastructure to senior IT and business leaders, authoring research and frameworks to address enterprise AI adoption. You'll collaborate across teams to integrate AI technologies into on-premises, hybrid, and edge environments, delivering tailored insights to Heads of Infrastructure & Operations and executive stakeholders. Responsibilities include planning and implementing AI infrastructurecovering application architecture, data management, security, and hardwarewhile developing scalable reference architectures and strategies for diverse industries for insights through producing research contents and engagement with clients. You'll monitor trends in computing, cloud, DevOps, and networking to inform Gartner's research and client recommendations.

The ideal candidate has deep expertise in AI infrastructure and enterprise computing, with senior leadership experience and strong communication skills. Proven thought leadership and a client-focused, collaborative approach are highly valued.

You will make a lasting impact by helping the world's leading organizations navigate the complexities of AI-driven transformation. And you will find that Gartner will be your best place to be as home in your career, which is proven by some analysts who have come back to Gartner analysts.

What You Will Do

Drive Thought Leadership: Create innovative, thought-provoking, and highly leveraged "must-have" business and technology insights content, to demonstrate thought leadership across a team of analysts. Your work will spark new ideas and inspire teams of analysts and executives alike. Help our clients to create or advise on AI, and AI Infrastructure strategies and technology roadmap

Accelerate Client Success: Develop actionable, forward-thinking solutions that empower clients to overcome challenges and seize new opportunities. Your insights will help clients move from strategy to action fast.

Shape the Future: Dive deep into client needs, uncover root causes, and anticipate market shifts. You'll reframe strategies and help clients and vendors stay ahead of the curve.

Influence at the Highest Levels: Engage directly with heads of Infrastructure & Operations and other C-level leaders, delivering high-impact advice in both virtual and in-person settings

Be a Market Voice: Collaborate with sales and BTI teams as the voice of the market, ensuring our content and solutions drive real client engagement and business growth.

Be a Market Guide: Navigate the landscape of top vendors, such as Nvidia, AMD, Huawei, Intel, HPE, Dell, AWS, Microsoft and, Google and Oracle, as well as emerging AI vendors and neo-cloud providers and their go-to-market strategies.

Create and Deliver Powerful Presentations: Design and deliver compelling contents, including presentations for Gartner events, industry conferences, and executive briefingson stage and behind the scenes.

Mentor & Innovate: Be a mentor and a coach by supporting more junior team members, champion new ideas, and providing high-quality and timely peer review, to shape a culture of continuous improvement and collaborations, for Gartner impact

Pioneer Playbooks: Create unconventional frameworks that show enterprises how to squeeze 110% value out of every AI-oriented initiative.

Spot Tomorrow, Act Today: Identify emerging trends in AI infrastructure and guide clients to build for the futurewhether diagramming enterprise-scale pipelines or reframing industry perspectives on AI readiness, you'll think at altitude and act with precision.

Become a voice the industry trusts: Speak, write, and debate in ways that influence leaders, shape boardroom strategies, and inspire technology roadmaps.

Cross boundaries: Bring together compute architecture, networking, storage, data pipelines, observability, MLOps, security, and ethical AI into one integrated vision.

What You Will Need

Education: Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience; Graduate degree preferred

Time in-seat: 12+ years of relevant field or industry experience

Seasoned I&O Experience for Heads of I&O: Have led Infrastructure & Operations at the highest level in mid- or large-sized organizations, bringing recent, hands-on executive experience, with experiencing AI Use cases and infrastructure requirements across industries and geographies

AI Infrastructure Expertise: From CPUs, GPUs, ASICs and ARM processors to distributed training pipelines to model-serving architectures, you know the plumbing that makes AI possible. - Technical knowledge of building strong AI infrastructure Strategy and architecture including data ingestion & processing, networking solutions, cloud infrastructure, platforms, DevOps and frameworks.

Executive Presence: Establish trust and credibility with senior leaders and stakeholders in every interaction.

Deadline-driven and detail-obsessed: Deliver high-quality work under pressure and meet tight deadlines with precision.

Masterful Storyteller and Writer: Transform complex data into clear, compelling insightsand craft actionable content and advice that drives decisions.

Business-savvy strategist: Experience building TCO models, ROI analyses, and forecasts for large-scale AI investments, especially for Infrastructure and Operations

Independence within Collaboration: Work autonomously and partner seamlessly with colleagues across cultures and time zones.

Be a Gartner ambassador: Represent our BTI methodology and strategies with clarity and conviction at all levels.

Ready for the Road Attitude: Travel up to 25% to connect with clients and colleagues worldwide.

Integration Architect: Have connected AI infrastructure across cloud, on-premises, AIOps/MLOps, and automation technologies.

Security and Sustainability Champion: Experience implementing best practices in governance, compliance, data protection, and green computing.

Explorer Mindset: Adapt to diverse environments and verticals, bringing broad perspective to every challenge.

Critical thinking on overdrive: You won't just explain how things workyou'll challenge assumptions, expose blind spots, and point toward hidden opportunities.

Unfettered Curiosity: You're the type who can't leave a "why" unanswered and sees constraints as puzzles waiting to be cracked. Learning agile and adept with navigating highly matrixed environments

Compelling Communication: You can translate dense technical complexity into narratives that stick in a CEO's headand a developer's hands, through presenting at large and small-scale speaking engagements and 1on1s

Be a Bold innovator: Propose ideas that seem wild today but become tomorrow's best practices.

What You Will Get

Competitive salary, generous paid time off policy, charity match program, Medical, Dental & Vision Plans, Parental Leave, Employee Assistance Program (EAP), 401K matching and more!

Collaborative, team-oriented culture that embraces diversity

Professional development and unlimited growth opportunities