Senior Manager, AI Platform & Delivery

TAG - The Aspen Group•Chicago, IL

4d•$165,000 - $195,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Aspen Group (TAG) is seeking a Senior Manager of AI Platform & Delivery to lead the teams that build and operate the foundation for AI adoption. This role involves owning the strategy, roadmap, operation, and governance of enterprise AI platforms (Claude Enterprise and Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform) and leading the Delivery function to ship platform capabilities. The ideal candidate is an engineering leader with experience in platform, DevOps, SRE, or MLOps, who is passionate about AI enablement and wants to manage an emerging AI platform from end to end. This is a hands-on leadership role requiring strategic thinking and technical understanding.

Requirements

8+ years in platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, MLOps, cloud, or a related software/infrastructure discipline, including 2–3+ years directly managing or leading engineering teams.
Demonstrated success building, leading, and growing high-performing engineering teams — hiring, mentoring, and developing engineers.
Strong technical foundation: Google Cloud (GCP), containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or similar).
Strong grasp of modern CI/CD and continuous delivery — pipeline design (GitLab CI or equivalent), GitOps (ArgoCD or similar), and deployment orchestration / progressive delivery (Spinnaker or similar) — including secure, keyless authentication to cloud providers.
Experience operationalizing AI/LLM or data/ML workloads in production — or a strong infrastructure foundation and clear eagerness to lead in the AI space.
Working knowledge of how LLMs and AI APIs are used in applications (prompting, RAG, embeddings, tool/function calling, agents).
Track record of owning strategy and roadmap, setting priorities, and driving delivery across multiple workstreams.
Excellent written and verbal communication and stakeholder-management skills; able to influence leadership and explain technical concepts to non-experts.
Solid grasp of operational best practices, monitoring/observability, and cost governance.
Based in (or willing to relocate to) the Chicago area and able to work onsite/hybrid.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience with Claude Enterprise; deployment, administration, onboarding, plugins, connectors, or MCP.
Experience with Gemini Enterprise and/or the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI) — Agent Builder/Agent Engine, Agent Garden, Model Garden, RAG/Vector Search.
Experience leading AI enablement, governance, or practical AI programs across an organization.
Experience managing a plugin/extension ecosystem or an internal app/agent marketplace.
Background partnering with FinOps to drive cloud and AI cost visibility and accountability.
Experience building or scaling internal developer platforms or developer-experience functions.
Direct, hands-on experience operating GitOps and continuous delivery at scale — ArgoCD, Spinnaker, GitLab / GitLab CI, and Argo Rollouts or Flux — across Kubernetes (GKE) and serverless (Cloud Run).
Familiarity with DORA metrics and a track record of measurably improving software delivery performance.
Experience managing vendors and partner relationships with cloud and AI providers.
Familiarity with our stack: Google Cloud / BigQuery, Atlassian (Jira/Confluence), incident.io, Grafana/OTEL, Sentry, Microsoft 365.
Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and grow a team of AI Platform and Delivery engineers through hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development.
Set clear goals and priorities, foster a healthy, inclusive, high-trust team culture, and create the conditions for engineers to do their best work.
Balance hands-on technical involvement with delegation, empowering the team to own systems end to end.
Own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for enterprise AI platforms (Claude Enterprise and Gemini Enterprise) on Google Cloud.
Prioritize across competing demands (adoption, reliability, cost, security, and governance) and communicate trade-offs clearly to leadership and stakeholders.
Set direction for the surrounding ecosystem: plugins, connectors, MCP integrations, and the internal marketplace of approved extensions, agents, and integrations.
Own the software delivery platform and toolchain end to end, including source control and CI/CD, GitOps-based continuous delivery, and deployment orchestration.
Set the standards teams build, release, and ship on.
Drive secure-by-default, standardized pipelines and GitOps workflows.
Lead the Delivery function so platform capabilities and paved paths ship reliably and predictably to application and engineering teams.
Manage delivery tooling roadmap, upgrades, and migrations.
Champion developer experience — golden paths, paved roads, reference architectures, self-service onboarding, and templates.
Drive execution and delivery performance across the team’s workstreams: planning, prioritization, healthy delivery cadence, and steady improvement in DORA metrics.
Ensure AI platforms and services are reliable, performant, observable, and cost-effective in production.
Mature how the team operates: on-call, incident response, post-incident reviews, SLAs, and operational metrics for both deterministic and non-deterministic (AI) systems.
Own platform cost governance (usage, seat utilization, and spend) across Claude Enterprise, Gemini Enterprise, and Google Cloud.
Partner with Security, IT, and leadership to define and enforce standards, guardrails, and policies for safe, secure, and responsible AI use.
Oversee identity, access, and provisioning at scale.
Ensure evaluation harnesses and quality checks are in place to measure AI output quality and catch regressions.
Serve as the primary point of contact for AI platform and delivery topics across the business; translate technical capabilities into business value.
Communicate roadmap, adoption, and outcomes to leadership and partner teams.
Manage relationships with key vendors and partners (e.g., Anthropic and Google Cloud), including licensing, seats, and roadmap alignment.