Engineering Manager Generative AI

Job description

Deputy is a global SaaS remote-first workforce management company with hubs in Sydney, Melbourne, San Francisco and London, plus team members working remotely across the United States.Our platform serves over 1.5 million workers and 375,000 workplaces across 100+ countries. We are backed by top global investors and recently achieved Unicorn status.

At Deputy, we’re improving the world of work, one shift at a time, for 80% of the world’s workforce: hourly workers. These are the dedicated employees who keep our world running – from baristas to nurses, cleaners to delivery drivers, florists to factory workers. Despite their vital role in society, most workplace technology has focused on those workers who sit behind a desk, but at Deputy, we transform the frontline. When businesses use Deputy, their workplaces thrive – the business is more profitable, compliant, and productive, while the workers are more engaged and happier at work.

If you’re passionate about creating solutions that put people first and helping businesses and their teams thrive, join us at Deputy and make an impact where it matters most!

The role

Reporting to the Director of Engineering, your key responsibilities will be to direct a team of dedicated engineers of varied experience levels.

Engineering innovation is the fuel that powers Deputy. As a Software Engineering Manager your mission is to take our high performing team to new heights, building a world-class engineering team.

As we are a growth company, you’ll have a strong bias to innovation, growth and adapting to change.

As an Engineering Manager specializing in Generative AI (including Agentic AI), you’ll be instrumental in advancing our company’s mission to revolutionize the world of work, one shift at a time. You’ll be responsible for making strategic technical decisions that are sustainable, robust, and highly likely to succeed, accelerating our business, growth, and innovation trajectory, with a specific focus on leveraging Generative AI for intelligent agent development.

You will collaborate closely with peers, product, design, and leadership to build outstanding AI-powered products and features leveraging autonomous agents for the Deputy platform. Your work will deliver sophisticated services to millions of users and businesses, from small and medium-sized enterprises to large corporations.

You’ll wake up every morning knowing with confidence that your work is being used to power 365,000 workplaces and the livelihood of millions of users worldwide through cutting-edge AI innovation.

Responsibilities - People Leader

• Mentor, develop, and guide a team of software engineers so they can do their best work.
• Lead the recruiting of new engineers within your team as we grow and build a world-class, sustainable and diverse engineering team.
• Own the Engineering Team Engagement score (quarterly measure of team engagement), by building upon our interactive, learning-oriented engineering community

Inspiring Technical Manager

• This is a highly technical role. You will be expected to lead from a place of understanding and to do so you will develop an intimate understanding of the underlying technical architecture as well as contributing to the future direction of the platform. Your first months will see you writing code and contributing as an individual contributor.
• Co-create the technical vision, strategy and technical roadmap planning and product definition for your team, alongside your technical leads and PM/product designer
• Become intimately familiar with our product, languages, and our tech stack to drive decisions about frameworks, architecture and decisions
• Bias towards value creation: guide the team to building innovative, elegant solutions by balancing trade-offs with the best interests of the company. Guide the team on important architectural and long-term engineering decisions, as well as shorter-term tradeoffs. Stay technical to provide meaningful guidance on engineering decisions.
• Drive the scalability and reliability of your squads offering as we grow
• Keep your pulse on the craft: writing architecture designs, working with infrastructure and quality on tooling for your team, and/or exploring POCs

Drive high performance

• Bias towards value creation: guide the team to building innovative, elegant solutions by balancing trade-offs with the best interests of the company. Guide the team on important architectural and long-term engineering decisions, as well as shorter-term tradeoffs. Stay technical to provide meaningful guidance on engineering decisions.
• Provide one on one feedback, career advice and coaching for your team members
• Communicate openly and be the voice of the business within your team, keeping them informed of and working towards the business vision & goals
• Lead the recruiting of new engineers within your team as we grow and build a world-class, sustainable and diverse engineering team.
• Mentor team members to create a highly motivated, coherent, and cohesive culture which rewards high performance
• Own the Engineering Team Engagement score (quarterly measure of team engagement), by building upon our interactive, learning-oriented engineering community

Drive Generative AI at Deputy

• Define, lead, and document the long-term technical direction for our GenAI Agent platform and capabilities, ensuring alignment with our business goals and enabling the engineering team’s long-term scaling.
• Promote innovation, efficiency, scalability, and a culture of excellence within the organization, particularly in the realm of Generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and autonomous agent design.
• Serve as a technical authority, providing guidance and mentorship to our engineering teams on GenAI agent architectures, development methodologies, and best practices.
• Form a key member of the technical leadership team, driving standards, ways of working, and platform decision-making at an organizational level, with a keen eye on ethical AI and responsible agent deployment.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Infrastructure, Platform Quality, Product, and Design teams to ensure high-quality solutions and practices are employed, specifically for AI-driven agent functionalities.
• Drive discussions on new solutions, architectural choices, and emerging technologies that enable operational scalability and enhance the developer experience, with a focus on agent orchestration frameworks and prompt engineering techniques.
• Ensure that our technical decisions uphold the highest standards of quality, performance, scalability, reliability, availability, and security, especially concerning AI agent robustness and data privacy.
• Advocate for and implement advanced testing methodologies and CI/CD practices specifically tailored for GenAI agent development and deployment.

Technical leadership

• Become intimately familiar with our product, systems, and our tech stack to drive decisions about frameworks, architecture and decisions
• Drive adoption of best practices and best in class technology, design best practices, enforce principles of work
• Remove single point of failures by cross-skilling staff and making sensible, strategic resourcing decisions
• Experience with working on legacy codebase and migrating to newer architecture including data migration
• Developing subject matter technical expert in the domain you own
• Responsible for the technical decision making and architecture across portfolio of squads
• Accountability for 2-3 OKRs aligned to Company goals
• Can clearly design and communicate a technical roadmap to the organisation with proof of value.

Skills & Experience

• You have 4+ years of software engineering management experience building productive, high functioning teams. You can describe why these teams were high functioning and what you specifically did to ensure engineers felt productive.
• 10+ years in software development including significant time in a leadership or principal role, with a demonstrated focus on advanced AI/ML systems.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts, especially related to GenAI and agentic systems, to both technical and non-technical stakeholders and contribute to architectural decision-making.
• Experience in a fast growing scale-up environment, with a bias to innovation and growth. Bonus points for a multi-tenant SaaS org.
• Growth mindset. We are an early stage company that hasn’t figured it all out yet!
• Humbitious. We are ambitious to aim to make a significant global impact, and build a generational company, while humble enough to know it’ll take lots of hard work, learning from mistakes, and great people
• High agency mindset. High Agency is about finding a way to get what you want, without waiting for conditions to be perfect or otherwise blaming the circumstances. High Agency people either “find a way” in the face of adverse conditions or navigate to reverse the adverse conditions to achieve goals.
• Passion for technology. A nerd at heart, you know the massive leverage and exponential ability innovative technical solutions can have in making an impact in the world.
• Deep SaaS experience across multiple domains or problem spaces, with a strong understanding of how AI agents can solve complex business challenges.
• Have created a multi-year technical vision and seen it through to fruition through the deployment of solid communication skills, specifically involving AI-powered product roadmaps.
• Demonstrated ability to introduce new technologies or practices to a large engineering function and ensure successful take-up through advocacy, education, and governance, with a particular emphasis on adopting GenAI frameworks and agent-based paradigms.
• Possess excellent problem-solving skills, and have used these to have an outsized impact on a technical project, particularly in designing and troubleshooting intelligent agent behaviors.
• Proven ability to shape architectural strategies and drive technical innovation, with a strong track record in building and deploying GenAI agents.
• Execute on strategic direction including shifts in technology and paradigms, embracing the rapid evolution of Generative AI and autonomous systems.

Techie in you

• Experience building and scaling web and mobile applications, APIs, and backend services.
• Experience with cloud computing/architecture, particularly AWS, including multi-region and multi-tenant setups.
• Proven ability to build maintainable, high-performance mobile applications using industry best practices and design patterns.
• Backend and Infrastructure: Proficient with Python, familiarity with GoLang and PHP, Terraform is a plus.
• Frontend and Mobile: Familiarity with Javascript/Typescript (VueJS), mobile technologies (Swift and Kotlin) is a plus.
• Have built a deep strength in Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), and agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, or similar), and can demonstrate practical experience in areas such as prompt engineering, agent orchestration, and responsible AI.
• Experience with AWS Bedrock or similar managed foundation model services for building and deploying generative AI applications and agents.

Employee Perks

- Enjoy a flexible remote-first work policy (with a work-from-home stipend to set you up for success!)

- Own A piece of Deputy via our Employee Share Ownership Plan (ESOP)

- Take paid parental leave to support you and your family

- Stay protected with Group Salary Continuance Insurance

- Access support through our Employee Assistance Program

- Enjoy additional leave days — including  study assistance, celebration days and volunteering

- Join our global working groups focused on collaboration, belonging and connection

- Get creative at our annual Hackathons

- Take advantage of our novated leasing for electric vehicles, internet reimbursement and more!

Deputy believes in equal opportunity and that inclusiveness and diversity promotes innovation. Our global team members are from a variety of cultures. And we welcome different perspective and skills.

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