Manager, Software Engineering - AI Tools

About this role

AI2IO helps organizations navigate the complex landscape of technology solutions, from foundational IT services and system support to advanced software integration, automation, and cutting-edge AI implementations. Our expertise spans IT infrastructure management, custom software development, seamless system integrations, and optimization of low-code business automation, empowering clients to maximize their existing technology investments.

Join us and be part of a team where your voice matters, your work makes an impact, and your growth is a shared priority.

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…