Senior Engineering Manager – AI Advanced Development

World Wide Technology is a technology solutions company focused on intelligent AI, digital, cybersecurity, cloud, and infrastructure solutions. The Senior Engineering Manager will lead a small, hands-on team investigating emerging AI capabilities, building evaluations and prototypes, and making defensible recommendations. The role also involves hiring and coaching engineers, presenting findings to executive leadership, and handing accepted work to operational teams.

Responsibilities:

• Take executive and stakeholder asks about emerging AI capability and turn them into scoped, time-boxed investigations that produce a defensible recommendation
• Run experiments to a decision in weeks - building the smallest credible thing that answers the question and resist the pull toward polish
• Kill bets early and publicly, with a clear, written rationale that the organization can learn from and reuse
• Package accepted work for handoff: reference implementation, evaluation results, known limits, operating assumptions, and a receiving team that has agreed to take it
• Stay hands-on — build, prototype, and evaluate alongside the team, targeting roughly 60% of your time in the work itself
• Maintain a working point of view on the frontier of applied AI: models, agent frameworks, retrieval and context strategies, evaluation methods, and tooling — and know when each is genuinely ready
• Design and run evaluations that separate real capability from demo-quality results, including cost, latency, reliability, and failure-mode analysis
• Partner with platform, product, security, and data teams early so that anything handed off can operated by the team receiving it
• Say no to work that belongs elsewhere — production ownership, long-term support, and steady-state feature delivery — and route it to the right team
• Present findings, tradeoffs, and recommendations directly to executive leadership — in writing and in the room — including the conclusions that are unwelcome
• Write clearly and concisely for a senior audience: short, decision-oriented documents that stand on their own without a walkthrough
• Coach and develop senior engineers through clear expectations, direct feedback, and servant leadership

Requirements:

• Strong software engineering background with the ability to build working systems yourself, not only direct others to build them
• Demonstrated experience building AI-native applications — LLM integration, agents, retrieval, evaluation harnesses, and automation workflows
• Track record of moving from an ambiguous question to a defensible technical recommendation on a short timeline
• Experience leading senior engineers, including hiring, setting technical direction, and holding a high bar
• Demonstrated judgment about when a technology is ready and when it is not — including examples of work you stopped, and why
• Proficiency with modern backend and cloud technologies (e.g., Python and/or JavaScript/TypeScript, APIs, event-driven systems, containerized deployment)
• Experience designing evaluations for non-deterministic systems, and comfort reasoning about cost, latency, and failure modes
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with demonstrated experience presenting directly to executive leadership and defending a recommendation under scrutiny
• Ability to structure and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to senior, non-technical audiences, and to state uncertainty plainly rather than hiding it
• High tolerance for ambiguity, and the discipline to time-box work rather than let it expand
• Willingness to hand work away once the question is answered, and to let another team own the outcome
• Solid understanding of Agile and iterative delivery models
• Deep alignment with and commitment to the WWT Core Values
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• equivalent experience will be considered