Lead and mentor a cross-functional team of ML engineers, data scientists, and MLOps professionals. Oversee the full lifecycle of LLM and ML projects — from data collection to training, evaluation, and deployment. Collaborate with Research, Product, and Infrastructure teams to define goals, milestones, and success metrics. Provide technical direction on large-scale model training, fine-tuning, and distributed systems design. Implement best practices in MLOps, model governance, experiment tracking, and CI/CD for ML. Manage compute resources, budgets, and ensure compliance with data security and responsible AI standards. Communicate progress, risks, and results to stakeholders and executives effectively.