Manager; AI Engineering

Caterpillar Inc.•Peoria, IL

9d•$147,760 - $240,110

About The Position

Caterpillar’s Cat Digital organization is seeking a Software Engineering Manager to lead a team that designs, builds, and operates cloud-native AI agents and tools. The manager will provide technical and organizational leadership for development of enterprise-scale AI assistants that transform how Caterpillar customers, dealers, and employees interact with digital products. The role oversees end-to-end delivery of AI-powered applications and services, including agent-based architecture, agent orchestration frameworks, tooling services, and observability solutions. It combines people leadership with technical expertise in modern software engineering and generative AI. The manager is accountable for technical strategy and architecture, delivery and operations, service reliability and production support, team development, and compliance with enterprise security, governance, and responsible AI requirements.

Requirements

Proven ability to lead software engineering teams and deliver results through others.
Experience building highly engaged teams and developing engineering talent.
Deep understanding of modern software engineering principles, design patterns, and development practices.
Experience leading delivery of distributed cloud-native applications.
Experience designing scalable, resilient, and maintainable software platforms.
Ability to evaluate architectural tradeoffs and guide technical decisions.
Experience establishing testing strategies, observability standards, monitoring practices, and incident management processes.
Knowledge of reliability engineering, security best practices, and operational excellence.

Nice To Haves

Proven experience leading engineering teams.
Experience building AI assistants, digital copilots, autonomous agents, or AI-powered business applications.
Experience with AI evaluation, model observability, prompt management, and experimentation frameworks.
Experience working with cloud AI services and leading foundation models such as OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Gemini, or open-source alternatives.
Understanding of LLMs, RAG architecture, tool-calling patterns, prompt engineering, and agent orchestration frameworks.
Familiarity with frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, or similar technologies.
Experience building and operating applications on major cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Knowledge of containerization, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and platform operations.
Strong proficiency in Python, Go, Java, or similar programming languages.
Strong knowledge of Agile development.
Experience working in Azure DevOps.

Responsibilities

Lead and develop a high-performing team of software engineers responsible for AI agent and tooling development.
Drive technical strategy, architecture, and execution for cloud-native AI solutions.
Oversee the design, development, deployment, and operation of AI agents, agent orchestration, and supporting services.
Partner with product owners, architects, data scientists, business stakeholders, and engineering teams to define and deliver AI-enabled capabilities.
Establish engineering best practices, coding standards, testing frameworks, security controls, and operational excellence processes.
Own service reliability, scalability, performance, and production support for AI applications and platforms.
Lead release planning, resource allocation, project execution, and risk management across multiple initiatives.
Drive continuous improvement in engineering productivity, software quality, observability, and automation.
Develop team capabilities through coaching, mentoring, career development, and succession planning.
Foster a culture of innovation, experimentation, collaboration, and accountability.
Ensure compliance with enterprise security, governance, and responsible AI requirements.