Manager, Applied AI Engineering

McGraw Hill LLC. • UNAVAILABLE, UNAVAILABLE

3d • Remote

About The Position

At McGraw Hill, our mission is to unlock the full potential of every learner. This role puts you at the center of that mission, applying cutting-edge AI to products used by millions of students and educators. We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Manager, Applied AI Engineering to join our innovative team. The ideal candidate will possess extensive expertise in building and delivering highly scalable full stack AI-powered applications and providing engineering leadership and mentorship to high-performance AI-native engineering teams. As an Applied AI Engineering Manager at McGraw Hill, you provide leadership and technical guidance to your teams, have a sense of personal accountability, a curiosity to research new technologies and methodologies, and a pervasive desire to dig into complex issues while respecting timelines and team commitments. As a people manager, you have a strong desire and motivation to grow the individuals on your team and the team as a whole. Practical, hands-on experience in generative AI and a deep understanding of its principles and latest advancements are essential, as you will be expected to personally step in as tech lead on the organization's most strategic AI initiatives.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience in Software engineering, with at least 2 years in a leadership or management role.
• You have led teams of individual contributor engineers, coming from an engineering background yourself - with strong empathy, communication, and interpersonal skills, balancing the realities of the business with the needs of your team.
• You interface well with other business units and leadership, being able to describe situations and technical approaches to foster an environment of trust and confidence.
• You have practical, hands-on experience building and shipping production-grade LLM or agentic applications at enterprise scale, with a deep understanding of generative AI principles and the latest advancements.
• You have proven experience in designing, developing, and implementing complex software applications, with deep expertise across front-end and back-end development and the full software development life cycle - including application code, testing, documentation, and performance/security engineering.
• You have an ability to seamlessly shift focus between diverse projects and priorities in a dynamic work environment, managing multiple initiatives concurrently without compromising quality or focus.
• You have experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and modern development tools and methodologies.
• You can work in a fast-paced software release environment, where you continuously deliver production-grade (near-zero downtime, fault-tolerant, etc.) software daily for a system with millions of users around the world.

Nice To Haves

• Back-end: Python, Go, Node.js
• Front-end: TypeScript, Angular, React and Playwright
• AI services such as Azure AI Search, Azure OpenAI service, Amazon Bedrock or similar technologies.
• Agent frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen/CrewAI), vector databases (Pinecone, pgvector), and AI observability/eval tooling (LangSmith etc).
• Amazon Web Services (AWS): ECS, RDS, Lambda, and many other services
• CI/CD and Infrastructure: Docker, Terraform, Github, CircleCI, Sonarqube, NewRelic and Datadog
• Collaboration: JIRA, Confluence, Zoom, Slack, and Office 365
• Databases: Relational databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL; NoSQL databases such as DynamoDB

Responsibilities

• Operate as both a people manager and an individual technical contributor/tech lead, shifting between the two as project needs demand.
• Act as hands-on tech lead on the organization's most strategic enterprise AI initiatives, designing agentic and LLM-based systems firsthand and stepping in directly to resolve the team's hardest technical problems.
• Manage AI-native engineers and teams that move quickly and operate with high autonomy using modern AI tooling (copilots, agents, etc.).
• Own the team's AI token and compute budget, driving cost efficiency and responsible usage across AI tooling and infrastructure.
• Set technical standards for prompt engineering, RAG, agent orchestration, and evaluation of AI systems across the team.
• Drive software engineering excellence through coding, pair programming, code/architecture reviews, and comprehensive solution design.
• Manage stakeholder relationships and ensure the team's work meets compliance, application security, and data privacy standards alongside business requirements.
• Apply automation and CI/CD processes to enable smoother releases.
• Facilitate career development for your team through mentorship, identifying training opportunities, and skill-building.

Benefits

• An annual bonus plan may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical and/or other benefits, depending on the position offered.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior