Conductor

Made in Tandem; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Made in Tandem seeks a Conductor who blends senior engineering, architecture, and delivery leadership to own engagements end-to-end. You’ll drive architectural decisions, manage client relationships, and guide both engineers and AI-enabled workflows toward measurable outcomes.

You’ll lead complex, multi-domain initiatives, communicate trade-offs clearly, and ensure quality while balancing speed and craft. This hybrid Chicago/remote role emphasizes translation between technical and business

Qualifications

• Demonstrated history of owning technical outcomes end-to-end.
• Direct client-facing experience: running calls, managing expectations, scope conversations.
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development workflows.
• Experience with at least two of: application development, data engineering, cloud infrastructure, or AI/ML systems.
• Strong communication skills, written and verbal, with technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Run the client relationship and communicate progress and risks.
• Help scope proposals and participate in discovery calls.
• Direct AI coding tools alongside human engineers and ensure production-ready output.
• Build and mentor the team of engineers and architects.

Skills

Client relationship

Architectural design

End-to-end ownership

AI-assisted development

Communication

Tools

AI tools

Data platform

Job description

Senior engineer-architect-PM hybrid. You own the architecture, the client relationship, and the outcome, end-to-end.

The Role

Conductor

Full-time · Chicago / Remote

The short version

You're a senior engineer who also happens to be a great architect, a sharp project leader, and the person clients actually want in the room. You've spent 10-15+ years building software, and somewhere along the way you stopped thinking of yourself as "just" an engineer. You started caring about whether the thing you built actually solved the business problem. You started running the client calls, not just sitting in on them. You started making the architectural calls and owning the outcomes, good and bad.

We built a role for people like you.

What this actually is

The Conductor is the foundational role at Made In Tandem. Not a new title for "senior developer." Not a project manager who used to code. It's a genuine hybrid: engineer, architect, delivery lead, and client partner rolled into one person who owns engagements end-to-end.

You'll architect solutions, make trade-off decisions, direct a mix of AI agents and senior engineers, ensure quality, and ship outcomes. You'll also be the person your client trusts. The one who communicates progress and risks without being asked. The one who handles the hard conversation about scope when it needs to happen.

The closest analogs in the market are Palantir's Forward Deployed Engineers, ThoughtWorks' Principal Consultants, and the best fractional CTOs. But none of those are quite right. A Conductor is what happens when you stop separating "the person who understands the problem" from "the person who builds the solution."

What you'll do

Run the client relationship

From the client's perspective, you're their person. You communicate progress, flag risks, handle scope conversations, and deliver the occasional difficult "no." You're the person they trust, not the person they call when something breaks.

Help win new work

Participate in discovery calls. Help scope proposals. Present at pitch meetings. Spot expansion opportunities inside existing accounts. The Conductor who delivers a successful assessment should be the one who helps sell the platform modernization that follows.

You'll direct AI coding tools alongside human engineers. That means knowing when to use AI code generation and when to hand a task to a person. It means building context-engineered workflows that compress timelines without producing garbage. This isn't about prompt writing. It's about judgment: knowing when AI-generated output is production-ready and when it's not.

Build the team

Participate in hiring other Conductors and vetting senior engineers. The people doing client work are the best judges of whether a candidate can actually do the work. This isn't extracurricular. It's part of the job.

Who We're Looking For

You're probably a fit if...

You've led complex engagements across multiple technology domains, and you've stopped counting which languages you know because the answer is "enough, and I'll learn the next one." You think at the system level and can articulate why a design decision is correct, not just what it is. You naturally reason about trade-offs, constraints, and second-order consequences.

You can whiteboard a data platform migration for a $200M manufacturer and then explain the trade-offs to a non-technical COO. In the same afternoon. Without switching personas.

You're comfortable with AI tools and use them daily, but you don't confuse speed with quality. You know that AI makes writing bad code faster too, and the bar for craft hasn't dropped. It's risen.

You take ownership of outcomes, not tasks. You es...??

The strongest signal we look for: translation ability. Can you move fluidly between technical and business contexts? Can you explain a complex system to a non-technical person without losing precision or dumbing it down? That's the single clearest indicator of Conductor potential.

You're probably not a fit if...

Your identity is attached to the "pure engineer" label. You avoid client interaction. You believe "I can do it faster myself" is a management philosophy. You optimize for perfection over pragmatism. You want to manage a team of reports and climb a title ladder.

Those are all legitimate preferences; there are great firms designed for them. This one isn't.

Experience & Skills

We care far more about judgment and trajectory than about specific technology stacks.

That said, here's what we're looking for.

Core (non-negotiable)

Demonstrated history of owning technical outcomes end-to-end, not just contributing to them

Direct client-facing experience: running calls, managing expectations, and having scope conversations

Proficiency with AI-assisted development workflows (the specific tools matter less than the judgment to use them well)

Experience with at least two of: application development, data engineering, cloud infrastructure, or AI/ML systems

Strong communication skills, written and verbal, with both technical and non-technical audiences

Preferred (genuinely preferred, not secretly required)

Experience in consulting, professional services, or client-embedded technical roles

Background in any of our target verticals: manufacturing, insurance, energy/utilities, healthcare, and logistics

Experience with mid-market enterprises ($50M-$500M revenue), especially PE-backed portfolio companies

Data platform architecture experience (warehouses, lakehouses, and integration layers)

Track record of identifying and helping close new business within existing client relationships

What we explicitly don't require

A computer science degree (or any specific degree). Mastery of a particular programming language or framework. Prior experience with the title "Conductor" (obviously). A LinkedIn profile full of consulting buzzwords.