Senior AI Engineering Manager - Forward Deployed

The Role

You are a player‑coach who leads a team of Forward Deployed AI Engineers and Creative Pipeline Specialists building GenAI‑powered content production systems for the world's largest brands. You don’t manage from the sidelines — you write code, review PRs, make architecture calls, and unblock your team by rolling up your sleeves. Your technical credibility is your management tool.

What You’ll Do

• Lead by building. You are hands‑on, contributing directly to production systems — writing code, reviewing architecture, debugging deployments — especially when progress or clarity depends on it. Minimum 30% of your time is technical work.
• Own delivery outcomes. Drive end‑to‑end delivery across multiple customer engagements, scoping work, sequencing delivery, removing blockers early, and making fast trade‑offs between speed, scope, and quality. Every engagement ties back to measurable value realization and customer adoption.
• Grow a high-performing team. Recruit, develop, and retain exceptional AI engineers. Set a high bar for performance, give direct, actionable feedback, and build a culture of ownership, speed, and trust.
• Set technical direction. Guide architecture decisions, enforce engineering standards, and ensure your team builds scalable, reusable systems. Define what 'production-ready' means.
• Drive the product feedback loop. Translate field‑proven patterns into actionable product roadmap input, ensuring what your team learns in the field reaches the product builders.
• Scale the org, not just the headcount. Codify what works into playbooks, shared tooling, and reusable frameworks to make every subsequent engagement faster.
• Represent the org externally. Showcase your team's work at customer workshops, internal reviews, and industry forums; publish, speak, and build the reputation of FDE as a world‑class engineering org.

What You Bring

• You still write code. You write and review production‑grade code (Python, TypeScript/Node.js, React, or equivalent). You can debug deployments, review PRs with real feedback, and make targeted IC contributions when the team needs it.
• Engineering management track record. 3+ years managing high‑performing engineering teams (8+ total years in software engineering). You’ve hired strong engineers, grown careers, managed performance, and built teams that ship.
• Hands‑on GenAI experience. Built or deployed AI‑powered systems — LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, agent frameworks, or equivalent. Able to make informed architecture decisions about agents, fine‑tuning, prompt‑engineering, and alternative approaches.
• AI‑native operator. Use tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or equivalent daily. Built or extended MCP servers, experimented with agentic workflows, or automated your own team’s processes with AI.
• Creative content supply chain experience. Built content production systems, MarTech platforms, asset automation tools, or creative workflow technology—ideally at an ad agency, creative studio, or marketing technology company.
• Customer‑facing leadership. Ran technical workshops, presented to stakeholders, embedded with client teams. Earned trust with both the VP of Creative and the lead engineer. Up to 30% travel to customer sites.
• Startup speed, enterprise judgment. Operated in fast‑moving environments, made fast, sound decisions under pressure, and simplified complexity instead of adding process.

What Sets You Apart

• Former technical founder, technical director at an agency, or early engineer at a startup who built a product from scratch.
• Built AI‑powered creative production or content automation systems.
• Managed globally distributed teams and built cohesion across time zones.
• Use AI agents to drive your own management workflows—scheduling, prioritization, tracking, reporting.
• Introduced engineering practices (CI/CD, DORA metrics, code quality standards) into organizations that lacked them.