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VP, Global HR Business Partner – Business AI, Technology \& Product (BATP) \- Remote, US
Let’s be unstoppable together!
Circana is a leading provider of technology, AI, and data solutions for consumer packaged goods companies, manufacturers, and retailers. Our predictive analytics and Liquid Data® platform help clients measure market share, uncover consumer behavior, and drive growth—powered by six decades of expertise and an expansive, high\-quality data set.
At Circana, we are fueled by our passion for continuous learning and growth, we seek and share feedback freely, and we celebrate victories both big and small in an environment that is flexible and accommodating to our work and personal lives. We’re a global company dedicated to fostering inclusivity and belonging. We value and celebrate the unique experiences, cultures, and viewpoints that each individual brings. By embracing a wide range of backgrounds, skills, expertise, and beyond, we create a stronger, more innovative environment for our employees, clients, and communities. With us, you can always bring your full self to work. Join our inclusive, committed team to be a challenger, own outcomes, and stay curious together. Circana is proud to be Certified™ by Great Place To Work®. This prestigious award is based entirely on what current employees say about their experience working at Circana. Learn more at www.circana.com.
Role Overview
We are seeking a dynamic and strategic Vice President, Human Resources Business Partner (HRBP) to lead HR for our global Business AI, Technology and Product (BATP) organization.
This role serves as a trusted advisor to senior Technology, Product, Data, and AI leaders, driving organizational effectiveness, talent strategy, workforce planning, leadership capability, and business transformation across a complex global organization. Working closely with executive stakeholders, the VP will help shape people strategies that support growth, innovation, and evolving operating models.
The ideal candidate combines strategic thinking with strong execution, brings deep expertise supporting technology\-focused organizations, and has a track record of driving meaningful organizational outcomes in fast\-paced, global environments. They are passionate about enabling business performance while fostering an inclusive, high\-performing culture.
Job Responsibilities
Strategic HR Leadership:
- Partner with executive leaders and their leadership teams to align people strategies with business objectives.
- Serve as a trusted advisor on organizational design, workforce planning, leadership effectiveness, and change management.
- Lead people strategies that support transformation, operating model evolution, and business growth across a global technology\-focused organization.
- Partner with senior Technology, Product, Data, and AI leaders to assess organizational effectiveness and implement changes that improve business performance.
- Serve as a member of the senior leadership team, contributing to business decisions and strategy formulation.
- Partner with Finance on headcount planning, workforce investments, and related budgetary decisions.
Talent Management and Development:
- Develop and execute talent strategies that attract, retain, and develop high\-performing technology and product talent.
- Evaluate leadership capability and organizational talent needs, building succession and development strategies for critical leadership roles.
- Develop and implement leadership development, succession planning, and employee engagement initiatives.
- Identify and address capability gaps to build a high\-performing and agile workforce.
Employee Relations and Culture:
- Foster a positive, inclusive, and high\-performing work environment across the BATP organization.
- Handle complex employee relations matters in partnership with local Country HR Directors and Centers of Excellence.
- Champion a culture of accountability, collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement.
Performance and Rewards:
- Partner with Total Rewards to ensure competitive, equitable, and market\-aligned reward programs.
- Drive performance management practices that strengthen business results, employee growth, and leadership accountability.
Operational HR Excellence:
- Lead HR initiatives, process improvements, and organizational programs that support scalability and effectiveness.
- Ensure compliance with applicable labor laws and regulations across multiple geographies.
- Use workforce and organizational data to identify trends, diagnose business challenges, and influence decision\-making.
- Monitor HR metrics and provide actionable insights to support business and talent strategies.
Inspire, Coach \& Lead
- Lead, develop, and coach the BATP HR team while fostering a high\-performance, high\-accountability culture.
- Balance strategic leadership with execution in a dynamic environment with evolving priorities.
- Drive HR operational excellence while delivering a strong employee and manager experience.
Requirements
- 12\+ years of progressive HR experience, including senior HRBP leadership experience supporting technology, product, engineering, AI, data, or digital organizations.
- Experience partnering with senior technology executives in large\-scale, global organizations, influencing decisions related to organizational design, workforce strategy, talent planning, and business transformation.
- Proven success leading organizations through growth, transformation, operating model change, restructuring, and other complex business initiatives.
- Deep expertise in organizational design, workforce planning, and talent strategy within evolving and complex business environments.
- Global HR experience, including multi\-country workforce practices, employee relations, and organizational leadership.
- Experience supporting technology\-led, software, SaaS, analytics, product\-centric, or digital\-first organizations strongly preferred.
- Demonstrated ability to influence and challenge senior leaders, build credibility quickly, and drive alignment across complex stakeholder groups.
- Strong knowledge of employment law, HR best practices, and compliance within a global business environment.
- Excellent communication, consulting, and problem\-solving skills, with the ability to influence, coach, and build credibility with senior leaders.
- Bachelor's degree in Human Resources, Business Administration, or a related field required.
- HR certification (SPHR, SHRM\-SCP) preferred.
Circana Behaviors
Beyond technical skills, experience, and role\-specific attributes, these shared behaviors are fundamental to our culture and success. We seek individuals who consistently demonstrate and champion these behaviors in their daily work:
- Stay Curious: Being hungry to learn and grow, always asking the big questions.
- Seek Clarity: Embracing complexity to create clarity and inspire action.
- Own the Outcome: Being accountable for decisions and taking ownership of our choices.
- Center on the Client: Relentlessly adding value for our customers.
- Be a Challenger: Never complacent, always striving for continuous improvement.
- Champion Inclusivity: Fostering trust in relationships engaging with empathy, respect, and integrity.
- Commit to each other: Contributing to making Circana a great place to work for everyone.
Location: Remote, US (CT/ET time zones preferred). As a member of a global HR leadership team, you will partner with leaders and employees across regions while enjoying the flexibility and autonomy of a remote\-first environment.
*The below range reflects the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future. An employee’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, seniority, geographic location, performance, shift, travel requirements, sales or revenue\-based metrics, any collective bargaining agreements, and business or organizational needs. The salary range for this position begins at $200,000 USD and will be determined based on experience, skills, qualifications, and overall alignment with the role. This position is also eligible for an annual bonus.*
*We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k) to eligible employees.*
*An offer of employment may be conditional upon successful completion of a background check in accordance with local legislation and our candidate privacy notice. Your current employer will not be contacted without your permission.*
*You can apply for this role through the Circana careers website or Intranet site for internal candidates. This role is subject to AI\-assisted screening. Circana uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assess resumes for alignment with job requirements by helping locate details in resumes that relate to the job description.*
*This position is expected to remain open for approximately 30 days and may close earlier if sufficient qualified candidates are identified.*
\#LI\-JP1
Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 3,708 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At Circana, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills in Demand for This Role
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $218,750 based on 3,817 positions with disclosed compensation.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($300,000) and Research Engineer ($280,000). By seniority level: Entry: $120,000; Mid: $200,000; Senior: $230,000; Director: $272,150; VP: $250,000.
Circana AI Hiring
Circana has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in US.
Remote Work Context
Remote AI roles pay a median of $185,334 across 717 positions. About 14% of all AI roles offer remote work.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 3,708 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 102 entry-level, 1,705 mid-level, 1,469 senior, and 432 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 14% of the market (508 positions). The remaining 3,180 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($300,000 median, 21 roles); Research Engineer ($280,000 median, 147 roles); AI Architect ($254,798 median, 67 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 3,708 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,605), Data Scientist (310), AI Software Engineer (259). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (102) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,705) and senior (1,469) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 432 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 14% of all AI roles (508 positions), with 3,180 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $217,500. Top-quartile roles start at $272,100, and the 90th percentile reaches $325,000. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $300,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,890 postings), Aws (1,103 postings), Azure (877 postings), Rag (855 postings), Gcp (631 postings), Prompt Engineering (560 postings), Pytorch (545 postings), Claude (498 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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