Manager, Software Engineer (AI)

Vestwell is the financial technology company powering the new savings economy. Our platform redefines how people save for the critical aspects of life across retirement education and healthcare savings needs. Today Vestwell enables over 350000 businesses and over 2M active savers with over $50B in assets saved across all 50 platform serves a diverse clientele including financial advisers employers third-party administrators financial institutions payroll providers government agencies and individual savers.

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Who Are We Looking For

The Engineering team is seeking an experiencedEngineering Manager to lead our AI Engineering organization. This leader will be responsible for building and scaling the engineering team that delivers AI-powered products and enterprise capabilities. You will combine strong technical leadership with exceptional people management partnering closely with Product Design Data and business leaders to define strategy execute against ambitious roadmaps and deliver reliable production-grade AI solutions.

The ideal candidate has a proven track record of leading high-performing engineering teams while remaining technically credible in modern AI and software engineering. You know how to balance execution with long-term architecture mentor engineers raise the engineering bar and build systems that scale.

Youre a great fit if you enjoy developing people as much as technology can navigate ambiguity and are passionate about delivering AI solutions that create measurable business value.

What Will You Be Doing

Your responsibilities will include but are not limited to:

• Lead mentor and grow a team of AI software engineers fostering a culture of technical excellence ownership and continuous learning.
• Drive engineering execution by establishing priorities managing delivery and ensuring predictable high-quality outcomes.
• Define the technical architecture and engineering direction for AI platforms services and enterprise applications.
• Partner with Product Design Data Science Security and business stakeholders to translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions.
• Architect build and oversee the delivery of production-grade AI services with a focus on reliability scalability observability and operational excellence.
• Guide the implementation of modern AI capabilities including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) AI agents orchestration frameworks and integrations with leading LLM providers.
• Establish engineering best practices for software development testing deployment code quality and operational support.
• Remain technically engaged by reviewing architecture mentoring engineers and contributing to key technical decisions and complex implementations when appropriate.
• Recruit coach and develop engineering talent while helping shape the long-term growth of the AI Engineering organization.

Requirements

The Necessities

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering Physics Mathematics or a related technical field.
• 8 years of professional software engineering experience including at least 3 years leading engineering teams.
• Proven experience building delivering and operating production software systems at scale.
• Experience leading engineering teams responsible for AI/ML-enabled products or platforms.
• Strong hands-on experience developing production applications in Python.
• Deep understanding of modern AI and machine learning concepts including large language models (LLMs) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) AI agents and model orchestration frameworks.
• Experience integrating AI services using leading LLM providers and modern AI frameworks such as LangChain LangGraph or similar technologies.
• Experience designing cloud-native applications using AWS Docker and modern deployment and CI/CD practices.
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and distributed application architectures.
• Strong understanding of software engineering best practices including testing observability security code review and operational excellence.
• Demonstrated ability to recruit mentor and develop high-performing engineering teams.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working in Agile development environments using tools such as GitHub Jira and Jenkins (or equivalent).

The Extras

• Experience in financial technology or regulated industries.
• Startup or high-growth company experience.
• Experience building and scaling AI platforms used across multiple products or business functions.
• Experience leading engineering organizations through rapid growth or organizational change.

Our Culture

We take a modern Agile approach to development trusting cross-functional squads to make bottom up decisions in terms of roadmap prioritization technical choices and day-to-day processes. We want squads to be first class citizens working as a team to define their roadmap and prioritization that follows best practices in development automation testing deploying and support.

This role will be based in our New York office and will be part of Vestwells hybrid in-office operation.

The expected base salary range for this position is $195K - $205K base. This position is eligible to participate in the Company Bonus Pool and is eligible to receive new hire equity in the Company. Please note that salary bands are based on NY and other similar metro areas and may differ based on where the role is ultimately hired.

OUR BENEFITS

Were an innovative high-growth company with an exciting future ahead. At Vestwell we prioritize employee wellbeing through comprehensive health benefits generous time off and a dedicated Employee Wellbeing Committee. Our hybrid work model offers flexibility while providing access to our collaborative offices in Midtown Manhattan Austin King of Prussia and Scottsdale. And of course as a company focused on helping people save for the future we offer a competitive 401(k) plan.

OUR PROCESS

Our interview process starts the same for every candidate with 1-2 introductory conversations to learn more about your background interests and what youre looking for while also giving you the opportunity to learn more about Vestwell and the team. From there the process varies by role but typically includes a skills or experience-based assessment such as a coding interview portfolio review or deeper discussion of your relevant experience. Successful candidates then move on to a virtual or in-person interview panel. Before extending an offer we complete a reference check with a current or former manager and a peer. Throughout the process we prioritize transparency clear communication and minimizing surprises.

For your awareness you will only receive correspondence from any other domain not ending not our Recruitment team.

VestwellsPrivacy Policy.Attention California residents: In the course of conducting our business and complying with federal state and local government regulations governing such matters as employment tax insurance etc. we must collect Personal Information from you. Should you accept employment with Vestwell you may view our California Privacy Rights Act here:Vestwells California Privacy Rights Policy.