Engineering Manager, AI Platforms
Role Summary
Suffolk’s AI Studio is seeking a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead the engineering execution of our AI systems and platform services. This role combines technical leadership, people management, and hands-on engineering. You will manage a team of AI engineers (U.S. and India) while contributing directly to architecture, code, and delivery of production AI systems. You will focus on:
- Raising engineering rigor
- Improving system architecture quality
- Ensuring scalable, reliable AI services
- Driving consistent delivery execution
Scope of Responsibility
This role is accountable for:
- Engineering execution quality
- Platform architecture implementation
- Team technical mentorship
- Delivery predictability
- Offshore team coordination
- Guide the team in building production-grade RAG pipelines and agentic systems
- Establish practical patterns for multi-model orchestration and inference reliability
- Ensure AI systems include cost controls, fallback strategies, and evaluation frameworks
- Review and improve agent safety, tool invocation patterns, and guardrails
- Lead architecture reviews for new AI services
- Improve API design standards, versioning practices, and event-driven patterns
- Ensure proper handling of retries, idempotency, and asynchronous workflows
- Drive adoption of observability and monitoring best practices
- Identify and remediate architectural debt
- Directly manage AI engineers in the U.S.
- Provide technical oversight and structured guidance to offshore India engineers
- Conduct code reviews and system design reviews
- Coach engineers in distributed systems thinking and production hardening
- Improve sprint execution discipline and technical accountability
- Ensure AI solutions move from prototype to production reliably
- Partner with Product and Domain AI leads to translate requirements into well-architected systems
- Coincide closely with DevOps on deployment, CI/CD, and infrastructure standards
- Improve predictability in delivery timelines and system reliability
- 8 years of professional software engineering experience
- 2+ years developing enterprise AI applications
- 2+ years of people management or technical team leadership
- Hands-on experience building LLM-integrated applications
- Experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases and agentic stacks
- Strong background in backend and distributed systems design
- Strong AWS experience (Lambda, ECS/EKS, API Gateway, SQS/SNS, Step Functions, Bedrock)
- Proven ability to lead offshore or distributed teams
- Strong coding proficiency in Python and one of Java, NodeJS, Rust or Kotlin
- AI services are production-ready, observable, and scalable
- The offshore team operates with clarity and accountability
- Architecture decisions are consistent and well-documented
- The AI engineering team improves in distributed systems maturity
- Delivery is predictable and high-quality
- Sitting for long periods of time
- Talking or hearing
- Performing fine motor, hand and finger skills in the use of a keyboard, telephone, or writing
- Frequent standing, walking, and reaching with arms and/or hands
- Specific vision abilities including close vision, distance vision, depth perception, and the ability to adjust focus
- Office environment with a quiet to moderate noise level
- Job site walking
Responsibilities
AI Systems Engineering Leadership
Qualifications
What Success Looks Like
Working Conditions
EEO Statement
Suffolk provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity, national origin, citizenship, genetic information, disability, protected veteran, gender identity, age or any other status protected by law. This policy applies to recruiting, hiring, transfers, promotions, terminations, compensation, benefits, and all other terms and conditions of employment. Suffolk will not tolerate any unlawful discrimination toward, or harassment of, applicants or employees by anyone at Suffolk, or anyone working on behalf of Suffolk.
Compensation Information
Where required by law, pay ranges can be found in Suffolk's job postings. Base Salary for this position is just one component of Suffolk’s total rewards package for employees. Actual salaries may be based on several factors including, but not limited to, a candidate's skill set, experience, education and other qualifications. Suffolk offers a comprehensive benefits package as part of its overall total rewards strategy. Salary ranges are reviewed regularly to reflect market trends.