Senior Vice President, AI Innovation — Agentic Factory

Vista Equity Partners is seeking a Senior Vice President of AI Innovation to lead and scale AI delivery across our 90+ portfolio companies through Vista’s Agentic Factory. This is a senior leadership role at the center of Vista’s most differentiated capability: a proven methodology for partnering with portfolio company leadership to identify high-value agentic use cases and rapidly ship production AI agents that deliver measurable business impact. 
 
The SVP will set the strategic direction for Agentic Factory engagements, lead a team of embedded AI engineers and architects, and serve as the senior practitioner voice on agentic AI across the portfolio. The ideal candidate combines deep expertise in generative AI, agents, and agentic architectures with the leadership presence to drive adoption at the executive level and the technical credibility to earn the trust of engineering teams on the ground. 
 
This is a hands-on leadership role — not a board assignment or a passive advisory function. The SVP will be in the work: setting the technical bar, removing blockers, and ensuring Vista’s Agentic Factory methodology delivers at the pace and quality the portfolio demands.  

Portfolio Strategy and Agentic Delivery Leadership 

• Own the strategic direction and end-to-end delivery of Agentic Factory engagements across the portfolio, ensuring agentic AI becomes a durable competitive advantage for Vista companies. 
• Partner with portfolio company senior leadership — including CEOs, CTOs, and CPOs — to identify and prioritize the highest-value agentic use cases aligned with product roadmaps, revenue objectives, and operational efficiency goals.
• Lead and govern rapid proof-of-value sprints that demonstrate measurable business impact, then drive portfolio companies from prototype through production at enterprise scale. 
• Oversee AI maturity assessments across the portfolio using Vista’s scoring rubrics, identifying gaps, setting improvement priorities, and ensuring tailored roadmaps translate into execution. 
• Ensure architectural quality across portfolio engagements, setting the standard for AI platform performance, scalability, security, and long-term maintainability.
• Champion the Agentic Factory methodology across Vista’s ecosystem — refining it based on delivery learnings and scaling what works across new engagements. 
• Create a culture of technical delivery, excellence, and innovation.  

AI Platform Architecture and Standards 

• Set and evolve Vista’s technical standards for AI platform architecture across the portfolio: cloud strategy, agentic design patterns, vendor independence, observability, and governance.
• Oversee the development and maintenance of reference architectures for agentic systems — including single-agent, multi-agent, and human-in-the-loop patterns — that serve as the foundation for every Agentic Factory engagement.
• Ensure autonomy calibration frameworks are applied consistently across enterprise deployments, incorporating human-in-the-loop checkpoints appropriate to risk, regulatory requirements, and domain complexity. 
• Define and enforce standards for AI model development, deployment, monitoring, and governance — including data privacy, model provenance, and audit trails for agent decision-making.
• Evaluate and select AI tools, platforms, and vendors in partnership with portfolio companies and Vista’s technology leadership. 

AI Innovation and Thought Leadership 

• Serve as Vista’s senior practitioner voice on generative AI, agents, and agentic architectures — providing strategic guidance to portfolio companies, Vista leadership, and prospective investors.
• Continuously assess the frontier of agentic AI — new models, frameworks, tooling, and architectural patterns — and translate findings into concrete recommendations for what Vista should build, scale, or adopt across the portfolio.
• Develop and evangelize best practices for AI platform design and delivery across the portfolio, capturing learnings from Agentic Factory engagements and converting them into reusable assets.
• Contribute to Vista’s external thought leadership positioning, including investor communications, industry forums, and ecosystem partnerships. 

Team Leadership and Development 

• Lead, mentor, and scale a team of embedded AI engineers, architects, and program managers working directly with portfolio companies across simultaneous Agentic Factory engagements.
• Foster a high-performance culture defined by speed, craftsmanship, and measurable outcomes — where engineers are empowered to move fast and deliver production-grade work.
• Manage team resources, capacity planning, and cross-portfolio prioritization to ensure the highest-impact engagements are staffed and delivered on time.
• Drive recruitment of additional AI talent in partnership with Vista’s leadership and talent acquisition teams. 
• Champion knowledge transfer across the Agentic Factory community, building reusable patterns, shared tooling, and practitioner networks that compound value across the portfolio. 

Program Management and Governance 

• Lead the planning, execution, and monitoring of AI programs across the portfolio, targeting MVP delivery in under a quarter and production deployment on compressed timelines.
• Develop and manage program budgets, timelines, and resource allocation across the Agentic Factory portfolio.
• Track and report on the performance of AI initiatives, delivering regular updates and executive-level insights to Vista’s Managing Director and senior leadership.
• Ensure proper governance of AI projects, including model risk management, compliance oversight, and vendor accountability. 

Due Diligence and Strategic Support 

• Partner with Vista’s deal team during M&A due diligence to assess AI technology capabilities, technical debt, and readiness for agentic AI adoption within target companies.
• Provide technical assessments and AI value creation frameworks that inform investment decisions and post-close integration plans.
• Support fundraising efforts by articulating Vista’s Agentic Factory differentiation and the measurable impact AI is driving across the portfolio. 

What You Are an Expert In 

Technical Expertise 

• Generative AI including large language models (LLMs), diffusion models, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures
• Agentic architectures, autonomous agents, and multi-agent systems at enterprise scale
• Cloud AI platforms across AWS, Azure, and GCP
• AI model development, deployment, and lifecycle management
• Prompt engineering, model fine-tuning, and evaluation design 
• Machine learning and deep learning fundamentals
• Platform abstraction and vendor-independent architecture design 

Operational Expertise 

• Leading and scaling technical teams delivering across multiple portfolio companies simultaneously
• Translating AI strategy into production-ready outcomes on compressed timelines
• Executive-level stakeholder management and cross-organizational influence
• AI maturity assessment, roadmap development, and portfolio-wide improvement planning
• Translating complex technical concepts for board-level and investor audiences
• Problem-solving and decision-making in high-ambiguity, high-stakes environments 

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related field (or equivalent experience). 
• 8+ years of experience in AI and enterprise technology, with a demonstrated track record of leading AI initiatives from concept to production at scale. 
• Deep recent experience (3+ years) in generative AI and agentic architectures in live production environments, not just prototypes.
• Proven ability to lead and grow high-performing technical teams across matrixed or multi-client environments.
• Extensive experience partnering with senior leadership teams — including C-suite executives — to drive AI adoption within complex organizations.
• Strong understanding of public cloud AI services and the ability to set vendor-agnostic architectural standards across a portfolio.
• Excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills — able to engage credibly with both engineering teams and executive stakeholders.
• Experience in private equity, management consulting, or multi-client environments serving enterprise software companies is highly desirable.
• Ability to travel as required to portfolio company sites. 

The annualized base pay range for this role is expected to be between $350,000 – $450,000. Actual compensation will vary based on experience, expertise, and geographic location. Additional components include annual performance-based bonuses and a comprehensive benefits package.

Vista is a leading global investment firm that exclusively invests in enterprise software, data and technology-enabled organizations across private equity, permanent capital, credit and public equity strategies, bringing an approach that prioritizes creating enduring market value for the benefit of its global ecosystem of investors, companies, customers and employees. Vista’s investments are anchored by a sizable long-term capital base, experience in structuring technology-oriented transactions and proven, flexible management techniques that drive sustainable growth. Vista believes the transformative power of technology is the key to an even better future — a healthier planet, a smarter economy, a diverse and inclusive community and a broader path to prosperity. Further information is available at vistaequitypartners.com. Follow Vista on LinkedIn, @Vista Equity Partners, and on X, @Vista_Equity.