Manager, Software Engineering - AI Tools

Position Title 

Manager, Software Engineering 

Position Location 

Remote - work virtually from anywhere in the United States 

Reports To 

Director, Software Engineering 

Job Summary

AI2IO is seeking a Manager, Software Engineering to lead the people, capability, and operating environment behind a growing AI platform and agent ecosystem serving architecture, engineering, construction, commissioning, design, proposal, and related business workflows. The team is building governed AI agents, semantic and knowledge-graph capabilities, retrieval and data pipelines, and shared platform services informed by data available within the QCS Ecosystem. 

This is a formal people-management role for all engineers and AI Engineer Technical Leads on the AI Tools team. Candidates must bring demonstrated professional experience leading, managing, architecting, or delivering production AI or LLM platforms or applications, with broad credibility and demonstrated depth across several relevant AI disciplines. The role develops people, builds workforce capability, improves team clarity, and helps translate strategy and architecture into context the team and broader organization can understand without replacing Technical Lead, architecture, product, analysis, or delivery authority. 

Essential Functions

This role grows from complete ownership of people leadership and the AI Tools delivery environment toward broader workforce strategy, specialized capability development, management-system improvement, and organizational leadership across a maturing AI engineering function. As the organization grows, expand impact through multi-team capability planning, development of technical and people leaders, management-system improvement, workforce strategy, and resolution of organizational challenges beyond the assigned specialty. 

Lead and Develop Engineers 

• Serve as the formal people manager for all engineers and Technical Leads assigned to the specialty team through regular one-on-ones, clear expectations, timely feedback, performance reviews, professional-development planning, and credible support for every direct report. 

• Provide recognition and development feedback throughout the year and address sustained performance concerns through clear expectations, documented support, follow-through, and appropriate organizational processes. 

• Connect individual goals to meaningful assignments, coaching, learning, mentoring, and increasing ownership without promising advancement before readiness is demonstrated. 

• Partner with Technical Leads to understand technical contribution and development needs while retaining accountability for career evaluation, formal performance decisions, employee relations, and team health. 

Build Team Capability and Leadership Depth 

• Maintain a current view of capacity, critical skills, experience distribution, key-person dependencies, succession risk, and staffing needs. 

• Identify capability gaps and coordinate learning, pairing, assignments, mentoring, hiring, and onboarding plans. 

• Develop future Technical Leads and management candidates through scoped assignments, calibrated feedback, explicit readiness criteria, and partnership with current leaders. 

• Reduce leadership and knowledge-continuity risk through distributed ownership, documentation, coverage, and succession options. 

Own the Sustainable Delivery Environment 

• Ensure teams have sufficient staffing, capability, role clarity, decision pathways, tools, and organizational support to deliver sustainably. 

• Partner with Technical Leads and Project Managers on delivery health, risk, dependencies, capacity, and recovery without replacing technical or project-management ownership. 

• Ensure material delivery problems receive appropriate management intervention, including staffing changes, escalation, cross-team negotiation, or leadership decisions. 

• Review recurring delays, incidents, rework, quality concerns, support burdens, and workload imbalance to identify organizational or capability improvements. 

• Protect teams from sustained overload and commitments incompatible with available capacity. 

Translate AI Strategy Into Clear Team Context 

• Partner with Director, AI Strategy and Enablement, Product Owners, Business Analysts, Project Managers, architecture contributors, and AI Engineer Technical Leads to translate strategic and architectural direction into objectives, decision context, capability needs, dependencies, risks, and intake-ready work. 

• Participate regularly in developer discussions and intake so AI specialists, mainstream software engineers, delivery partners, and leadership share a common understanding of goals, constraints, outcomes, and unresolved decisions. 

• Help Business Analysts and Product Owners clarify requirements and stories without taking over product ownership, analysis, acceptance criteria, or backlog priority. 

• Help technical leaders explain architectural and implementation direction to non-AI engineers and leadership. 

• Improve tactical documentation, communication rhythms, and decision records when high-level strategy is not yet expressed clearly enough for execution, while leaving architecture approval and technical decomposition with the appropriate leaders. 

Build AI Platform and Data Capability 

• Own workforce capability, staffing, development, and training plans spanning AI application engineering, agents, semantic engineering, ontology and taxonomy, data science, knowledge graphs, retrieval, data pipelines, evaluation, responsible AI, data governance, platform operations, and supporting software engineering. 

• Ensure the team has the mix of engineering, data, semantic, governance, quality, and operational skills required to build and support a governed AI platform and domain-specific agents. 

• Develop engineers across specialized AI concerns and the surrounding C#/.NET, Azure, API, identity, security, testing, CI/CD, observability, and production-support environment. 

• Reduce single-person dependencies in platform architecture, knowledge-graph pipelines, semantic models, agent workflows, data governance, and operations. 

Support Responsible AI, Data Governance, and Platform Maturity 

• Champion early adoption of responsible AI, data governance, access control, evaluation, observability, model-risk, knowledge-quality, and operational practices as dedicated capabilities mature. 

• Ensure staffing, training, ownership, and escalation paths exist for model and retrieval quality, sensitive-data handling, lineage, ontology changes, agent behavior, tool permissions, telemetry, incident learning, and support. 

• Partner with technical leaders and Director, AI Strategy and Enablement to identify governance and platform risks requiring clearer ownership, specialist support, or investment. 

• Balance research and experimentation with documentation, production readiness, supportability, security, quality, cost awareness, and sustainable delivery. 

• As architecture and governance functions mature, help evolve ownership boundaries while remaining accountable for staffing, training, participation, and organizational support. 

Build Healthy, Candid Team Practices 

• Establish practices that support candid discussion of risks, uncertainty, mistakes, technical disagreements, workload concerns, and alternative viewpoints without individual blame. 

• Address observable patterns such as unresolved conflict, sustained overload, escalation failures, knowledge bottlenecks, or reluctance to surface delivery problems. 

• Maintain reliable communication rhythms so engineers understand priorities, decisions, role boundaries, and available support. 

• Address performance, conduct, and employee-relations concerns through appropriate management processes rather than transferring formal accountability to Technical Leads. 

Lead Hiring, Selection, and Onboarding 

• Partner with the Director on workforce planning, role requirements, interview plans, evaluation criteria, and hiring priorities. 

• Lead structured and equitable selection processes, calibrate interviewers, document evidence, and make clear candidate recommendations. 

• Own consistent onboarding expectations, including role clarity, access, relationships, learning objectives, 30/60/90-day plans, and ramp check-ins. 

• Evaluate onboarding effectiveness through independence, role understanding, contribution, and feedback and improve the process based on evidence. 

• Identify retention risks early and coordinate appropriate responses. 

Maintain Clear Leadership Boundaries 

• Partner with Technical Leads, who own technical feasibility, estimates, dependencies, execution health, engineering standards, implementation direction, and team-level technical decisions. 

• Partner with Architects, who own cross-team architecture, technical standards, governance, and long-term technical direction. 

• Partner with Project Managers, who own the integrated schedule, formal stakeholder communication, scope coordination, project governance, and overall delivery process. 

• Partner with Product Owners and Business Analysts while preserving their authority for product value, priority, requirements, workflow analysis, and backlog readiness. 

• Use technical and domain fluency to understand risk, ask informed questions, clarify context, develop people, and improve the environment without becoming the default Technical Lead, Architect, Product Owner, Business Analyst, or Project Manager. 

Improve Management Systems and Organizational Effectiveness 

• Lead improvements to performance management, career development, hiring, onboarding, workforce planning, team operating practices, and leadership continuity. 

• Identify patterns spanning teams and coordinate improvements with peer Managers, Technical Leads, Architects, Project Managers, Product Owners, Business Analysts, and the Director. 

• Contribute to department-level capability planning, organizational design, role definition, career frameworks, cross-team staffing, leadership development, and organizational change. 

• Evaluate whether adopted practices improve clarity, fairness, staffing effectiveness, internal growth, management consistency, and sustainability. 

• Represent capacity, capability, succession, and organizational risk in department planning with concise evidence and decision-ready recommendations. 

• Performs Other Related Duties as Assigned 

What Success Looks Like 

• Direct reports understand expectations, receive timely feedback, and have credible development plans aligned with software-engineering and specialized AI capability needs. 

• The team has sufficient staffing, role clarity, technical leadership, training, and organizational support to deliver and operate the AI platform sustainably. 

• Strategic and architectural direction becomes understandable objectives, context, risks, dependencies, and intake-ready work without displacing Product Owner, Business Analyst, AI Engineer Technical Lead, architecture, or Project Manager authority. 

• AI Engineer Technical Leads retain technical authority and receive effective management partnership rather than tactical micromanagement. 

• Responsible AI, data governance, evaluation, access, observability, knowledge quality, and production-readiness initiatives have visible ownership, staffing, training, and progress. 

• Key-person risks in agent architecture, semantic engineering, knowledge graphs, data science, governance, and platform operations are reduced. 

• Engineers outside the specialty and leaders receive clear explanations of AI Tools work, tradeoffs, risks, and outcomes. 

• Management practices remain consistent with the broader Software Engineering organization while adapting to experimentation, research uncertainty, and production AI operations. 

Position Requirements

• Demonstrated professional experience leading, managing, architecting, or delivering production AI or LLM platforms or applications, with credible fluency across several of the following: agent systems, semantic engineering, retrieval, data science, data engineering, data governance, knowledge graphs, evaluation, responsible AI, and production AI operations. 

• Demonstrated ability to translate complex technical or architectural direction into organizational context, capability needs, risks, dependencies, and actionable team understanding. 

• Experience managing performance, difficult feedback, recognition, development, reviews, promotions, and sustained performance concerns. 

• Experience managing engineers and technical leaders while preserving clear authority for AI Engineer Technical Leads, Architects, Product Owners, Business Analysts, and Project Managers. 

• Experience with workforce planning, hiring, skill-gap assessment, onboarding, retention, succession, and staffing recommendations for specialized teams. 

• Sufficient software-engineering foundation to assess application architecture, APIs, data, identity, security, testing, CI/CD, observability, dependency, delivery, support, and operational risk without directing implementation. 

• Experience supporting responsible AI, data-governance, access-control, evaluation, observability, or model-risk practices in a growing organization. 

• Ability to communicate complex AI and data concepts to AI specialists, mainstream software teams, product and delivery partners, and leadership. 

• Experience managing distributed or remote teams and improving team practices, documentation, and leadership continuity. 

• Excellent interpersonal, written, verbal, coaching, facilitation, conflict-resolution, and organizational judgment. 

• Experience managing teams that build production AI platforms, agent frameworks, knowledge graphs, semantic layers, retrieval systems, or AI-enabled enterprise applications. 

• Hands-on background in AI architecture, LLM application development, data science, data engineering, ontology or taxonomy design, graph technologies, or semantic engineering. 

• Experience with Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Semantic Kernel, Azure AI Search, Python agent frameworks, Microsoft Azure, C#/.NET, or adjacent enterprise AI platforms. 

• Experience applying AI to AEC, commissioning, engineering design, proposal development, document-intensive workflows, or domain-specific business processes. 

• Experience developing Technical Leads, AI specialists, data professionals, or emerging technical leaders. 

• Relevant management, coaching, Azure AI, data, architecture, Agile, or project-management certifications. 

Why ai2io 

• Lead a specialized engineering team building a governed AI platform and agents for real AEC, commissioning, design, proposal, and business workflows. 

• Work at the intersection of software engineering, AI applications, semantic systems, data science, knowledge graphs, and organizational enablement. 

• Help convert ambitious AI strategy into a capable, supported team with clear context, sustainable practices, and strong technical leadership. 

• Shape hiring, development, governance adoption, leadership continuity, and operating systems during an important growth stage. 

Travel / Relocation Requirements 

• Up to 5%, this may include travel to any or all 50 US states 

• Travel is defined as physically leaving home on behalf of business activities including but not limited to client sites, meetings with other employees, meeting for business development purposes, running errands on behalf of the business, attending industry conferences, etc. 

Education / Experience Requirements 

• 8+ years of professional software engineering, AI engineering, data engineering, data science, or closely related technical-delivery experience, including at least 2 years of formal people management within a software or technology organization. 

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or a materially related field, or equivalent experience preferred. 

Benefits

AI2IO offers a very competitive benefits package; highlights include

• Choice of comprehensive medical plans (including two PPO-style plans and a HDHP w/ HSA option)
• Flex spending accounts (FSA)
• Dental and vision plans
• Comprehensive medical, dental and vision benefits extended to spouse / domestic partner and dependent children up to age 26
• 401k with company match and self-directed brokerage account option
• PTO including additional paid time off during the last week of the year
• Company paid life insurance coverage for employees and their eligible dependents
• Short and long-term disability, AD&D coverage
• Professional development opportunities, tuition reimbursement and professional licensing assistance
• Paid parental leave after one year of employment

CO, CA, IL, NY, WA, and Washington DC residents only: In accordance with CO, CA, IL, NY, WA, and Washington DC law, the range provided is AI2IO's reasonable estimate of the base compensation for this role. The actual amount may differ based on non-discriminatory factors such as experience, knowledge, skills, abilities, and location.

AI2IO is an EEO/Affirmative Action Employer and participates in the E-Verify program with the Department of Homeland Security. We encourage diversity in our workforce.

​NOTICE TO THIRD PARTY AGENCIES:

AI2IO does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters, employment agencies, or other staffing services. Unsolicited resumes include any resume or hiring document sent to AI2IO in the absence of a signed Service Agreement where AI2IO has expressly requested recruitment/staffing services specific to the position at hand. Any unsolicited resumes, including those submitted to hiring managers or other business leaders, will become the property of AI2IO and AI2IO will have the right to hire that candidate without reservation – no fee or other compensation will be owed or paid to the recruiter, employment agency, or other staffing service.