AI Engineering Manager

AI Engineering Manager

Agentic AI, Architecture & SaaS

Compensation: $220,000 - $250,000 base + bonus

Location: Remote, US

The Company

An established, PE-backed B2B SaaS company operating in a regulated market is making AI a core part of its product strategy. The business has a substantial existing customer base, multiple production platforms, and a roadmap moving from relatively straightforward LLM applications toward more sophisticated agentic systems and AI infrastructure.

The Opportunity

This is a high-impact architecture role for someone who wants broader technical leadership without stepping away from the code. You will help define how customer-facing AI is built across an established product portfolio while enabling a broader engineering organization to adopt stronger agentic, evaluation, context, and governance patterns.

The Role

You will take significant ownership of the architecture behind the company’s customer-facing AI capabilities and help lead a small senior AI team. This is explicitly a player-coach position: you will make important technical decisions, build reference implementations, work directly in the codebase, and partner with product engineering teams to ship production AI safely at scale.

What You’ll Do

• Own architecture across agentic workflows, compliance-focused AI, content generation, retrieval, memory, context, and other customer-facing AI capabilities.
• Design agent architectures, orchestration patterns, MCP integrations, reusable context standards, and reference implementations for wider engineering teams.
• Establish rigorous evaluation methodologies and quality standards for production AI features.
• Lead build-versus-buy decisions covering models, infrastructure, hosting, evaluation, and supporting AI platforms.
• Partner with product and platform engineering teams to prototype capabilities, move them into production, and transfer ownership without becoming a bottleneck.
• Help define technical approaches to data governance, tenant isolation, model hosting, privacy, cost management, and enterprise AI requirements.
• Coach engineers through architecture reviews, workshops, demos, and hands-on collaboration while continuing to write production code.

What You’ll Bring

• Software engineering experience, including senior technical ownership of a production AI product.
• Proven experience designing and shipping agentic systems involving orchestration, tool use, multi-step workflows, memory, or context management.
• Current hands-on knowledge of LLM application architecture, retrieval, evaluation, prompt/context engineering, and production AI systems.
• Experience operating at SaaS scale and improving existing products and architectures rather than working exclusively on greenfield systems.
• Ability to communicate complex architecture clearly to engineers, product teams, executives, and non-engineering stakeholders.
• A collaborative player-coach approach: comfortable setting technical direction while building relationships, mentoring teams, and working through regulatory or organizational constraints.

What This Role Requires

• Hands-on delivery of production agentic systems used by customers.
• Current fluency across LLM application architecture and evaluation.
• A genuine desire to remain hands-on in the code while taking on broader technical leadership.

Why Join

• Take meaningful ownership of one of the most strategically important technical areas in the business, with influence over AI architecture across multiple product teams.
• Work on real production challenges across agents, retrieval, knowledge graphs, evaluation, privacy, governance, and AI infrastructure rather than isolated prototypes.
• Keep building while growing into broader leadership responsibility, with the opportunity to raise the technical standard for AI across a substantial engineering organization.

About People in AI

People in AI is a specialist recruitment partner connecting exceptional AI, machine learning, data, and engineering talent with some of the most ambitious technology companies in the world. We work closely with founders, technical leaders, and hiring teams to represent opportunities accurately and help candidates assess genuine fit.