Manager, Software Engineer (AI)

Who Are We Looking For?

The Engineering team is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead our AI Engineering organization. This leader will be responsible for building and scaling the engineering team that delivers AI-powered products and enterprise capabilities. You will combine strong technical leadership with exceptional people management, partnering closely with Product, Design, Data, and business leaders to define strategy, execute against ambitious roadmaps, and deliver reliable, production-grade AI solutions.

The ideal candidate has a proven track record of leading high-performing engineering teams while remaining technically credible in modern AI and software engineering. You know how to balance execution with long-term architecture, mentor engineers, raise the engineering bar, and build systems that scale.

You’re a great fit if you enjoy developing people as much as technology, can navigate ambiguity, and are passionate about delivering AI solutions that create measurable business value.

What Will You Be Doing?

Your responsibilities will include, but are not limited to:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of AI software engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous learning.
• Drive engineering execution by establishing priorities, managing delivery, and ensuring predictable, high-quality outcomes.
• Define the technical architecture and engineering direction for AI platforms, services, and enterprise applications.
• Partner with Product, Design, Data Science, Security, and business stakeholders to translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions.
• Architect, build, and oversee the delivery of production-grade AI services with a focus on reliability, scalability, observability, and operational excellence.
• Guide the implementation of modern AI capabilities, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI agents, orchestration frameworks, and integrations with leading LLM providers.
• Establish engineering best practices for software development, testing, deployment, code quality, and operational support.
• Remain technically engaged by reviewing architecture, mentoring engineers, and contributing to key technical decisions and complex implementations when appropriate.
• Recruit, coach, and develop engineering talent while helping shape the long-term growth of the AI Engineering organization.

Requirements

The Necessities

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 3+ years leading engineering teams.
• Proven experience building, delivering, and operating production software systems at scale.
• Experience leading engineering teams responsible for AI/ML-enabled products or platforms.
• Strong hands-on experience developing production applications in Python.
• Deep understanding of modern AI and machine learning concepts, including large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI agents, and model orchestration frameworks.
• Experience integrating AI services using leading LLM providers and modern AI frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, or similar technologies.
• Experience designing cloud-native applications using AWS, Docker, and modern deployment and CI/CD practices.
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and distributed application architectures.
• Strong understanding of software engineering best practices, including testing, observability, security, code review, and operational excellence.
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, mentor, and develop high-performing engineering teams.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working in Agile development environments using tools such as GitHub, Jira, and Jenkins (or equivalent).

The Extras

• Experience in financial technology or regulated industries.
• Startup or high-growth company experience.
• Experience building and scaling AI platforms used across multiple products or business functions.
• Experience leading engineering organizations through rapid growth or organizational change.

Our Culture

We take a modern Agile approach to development, trusting cross-functional squads to make bottom up decisions in terms of roadmap prioritization, technical choices, and day-to-day processes. We want squads to be first class citizens, working as a team to define their roadmap and prioritization, that follows best practices in development, automation testing, deploying, and support.

This role will be based in our New York office, and will be part of Vestwell's hybrid in-office operation.

The expected base salary range for this position is $195K - $205K base. This position is eligible to participate in the Company Bonus Pool and is eligible to receive new hire equity in the Company. Please note that salary bands are based on NY and other similar metro areas and may differ based on where the role is ultimately hired.