Sr Machine Learning Engineering Manager - AI Quality and Governance

About the role

Join Workiva as a Sr Machine Learning Engineering Manager - AI Quality and Governance and help establish how we build, evaluate, release, and operate trustworthy AI products at scale. You will lead a multidisciplinary team of software, machine learning, and quality engineers responsible for two connected missions: advancing end-to-end quality across Workiva's AI platform and products, and building shared evaluation and governance capabilities that make our AI systems measurable, observable, reliable, and ready for enterprise use.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and develop a multidisciplinary team of software, ML, and quality engineers
• Build a culture of technical excellence, quality ownership, experimentation, and continuous improvement
• Establish clear team priorities while balancing platform investments, product needs, and enterprise risk
• Recruit engineers with complementary expertise across software quality, ML evaluation, platform engineering, and governance automation
• Define and drive a comprehensive quality strategy for Workiva's AI platform and products, spanning unit, integration, end-to-end, performance, resilience, security, and production testing
• Advance testing approaches for nondeterministic systems, including RAG pipelines, agents, prompts, models, tools, and multi-step workflows
• Detect regressions, model or data drift, unsafe behavior, and degraded customer experiences before and after release
• Translate Workiva's Responsible AI principles into practical engineering controls and platform capabilities
• Partner with Security, Legal, Privacy, Compliance, and Risk teams to define controls that support enterprise and regulated use cases
• Collaborate with Product, Program Management, UX, UXR, Data Science, Security, Legal, Risk, and engineering leaders to define quality expectations and roadmaps
• Champion production readiness, incident response, root-cause analysis, and continuous operational improvement

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field (or equivalent experience)
• 10+ years in software engineering, ML engineering, quality engineering, or related roles, including 4+ years leading an engineering team
• Strong software engineering and systems-design fundamentals, with experience delivering and operating production SaaS or platform capabilities
• Practical understanding of the generative AI development lifecycle and challenges of evaluating nondeterministic systems
• Experience with generative AI concepts: LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector/hybrid search, agents, tool use, and prompt orchestration
• Experience defining measurable quality criteria using data, experimentation, telemetry, and production signals
• Experience with cloud-native architectures on AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Proven ability to lead senior individual contributors, navigate technical disagreements, and build high-performance cultures
• Strong communication and cross-functional leadership skills

Preferred Qualifications

Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, ML, Data Science, or related field

• Experience building or operating AI/ML evaluation, experimentation, observability, model-governance, or ML platform capabilities
• Experience evaluating RAG and agentic systems, including retrieval quality, groundedness, task completion, tool use, and safety
• Familiarity with evaluation techniques: golden datasets, statistical metrics, model-based graders, human evaluation, red teaming, A/B testing, and drift/regression detection
• Working knowledge of ML/AI lifecycle practices: dataset management, model/prompt versioning, experiment tracking, deployment, monitoring, and feedback loops
• Familiarity with AI risk/governance frameworks (NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, or comparable)
• Experience with Kubernetes, microservices, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and modern DevOps/MLOps practices
• Experience supporting enterprise software in regulated or high-assurance environments

What You'll Do

Leadership & Team Development

• Lead, mentor, and develop a multidisciplinary team of software, ML, and quality engineers
• Build a culture of technical excellence, quality ownership, experimentation, and continuous improvement
• Establish clear team priorities while balancing platform investments, product needs, and enterprise risk
• Recruit engineers with complementary expertise across software quality, ML evaluation, platform engineering, and governance automation

Salary and Benefits

Salary range in the US: $193,000.00 - $308,000.00

• A discretionary bonus typically paid annually
• RSA granted at time of hire
• 401(k) match and comprehensive employee benefits package

Why Join Workiva

Workiva is the platform designed to bring confidence, control, and a competitive edge to the world’s most complex organizations. Our AI-powered platform unifies finance, risk, and sustainability on a single, secure foundation—ensuring data is trusted, traceable, and ready to act on. With an unbroken path from source to output, leaders gain confidence in their numbers, visibility into current and emerging risks, and the ability to move with speed and precision in a constantly changing world. At Workiva, you’ll bring technology to market that executives, boards, and regulators depend on. The work you do here helps organizations navigate uncertainty, maintain trust, and make decisions that stand up to scrutiny.