Senior AI Engineering Lead — Fast, Decision‑Driven, Hands‑On

World Wide Technology; Maryland Heights (MO); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Dental & Vision

Onsite health centers (MO & IL)

Employee Assistance Program

Wellness program

Profit sharing

401k with company matching

Life and disability insurance

Tuition reimbursement

PTO & Holidays

Parental leave

Pet insurance

Employee discount

Job summary

World Wide Technology is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for AI Advanced Development to lead a small, high‑impact team charged with turning bold AI questions into decisions rather than demos.

You will write, run and evaluate code, coach engineers, and present clear, data‑driven recommendations to executive leadership—often without intermediaries—and help shape faster, responsible AI adoption across the company.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background capable of building working systems.
• Experience building AI-native applications (LLM integration, agents, retrieval, evaluation harnesses).
• Proven ability to turn ambiguous questions into defensible technical recommendations on short timelines.
• Experience leading senior engineers, hiring, and setting technical direction.
• Judgment on when a technology is ready and when to stop.
• Proficiency with modern backend/cloud technologies (Python/JS, APIs, event-driven, containers).
• Exceptional written and verbal communication to executive leadership.
• Ability to communicate tradeoffs clearly to senior non-technical audiences.
• High tolerance for ambiguity and time-boxed work.
• Willingness to hand work away after answering the question.
• Alignment with WWT Core Values.

Responsibilities

• Take executive and stakeholder asks about emerging AI capability and turn them into scoped, time‑boxed investigations that produce a defensible recommendation.
• Run experiments to a decision in weeks - building the smallest credible thing that answers the question and resist the pull toward polish.
• Kill bets early and publicly, with a clear, written rationale that the organization can learn from and reuse.
• Package accepted work for handoff: reference implementation, evaluation results, known limits, operating assumptions, and a receiving team that has agreed to take it.
• Stay hands‑on — build, prototype, and evaluate alongside the team, targeting roughly 60% of your time in the work itself.
• Maintain a working point of view on the frontier of applied AI: models, agent frameworks, retrieval and context strategies, evaluation methods, and tooling
• Design and run evaluations that separate real capability from demo‑quality results, including cost, latency, reliability, and failure‑mode analysis.
• Partner with platform, product, security, and data teams early so that anything handed off can operated by the team receiving it.
• Say no to work that belongs elsewhere — production ownership, long‑term support, and steady‑state feature delivery.
• Present findings, tradeoffs, and recommendations directly to executive leadership — in writing and in the room.
• Write clearly and concisely for a senior audience: short, decision‑oriented documents.
• Coach and develop senior engineers through clear expectations, direct feedback, and servant leadership.

Skills

Software engineering

AI-native apps

LLM integration

Agents & retrieval

Evaluation harnesses

Automation workflows

Executive communication

Stakeholder management

Leadership of engineers

Agile delivery

Education

Bachelor’s in CS/Engineering

Tools

Python

JavaScript/TypeScript

APIs

Event-driven

Containerized deployment

Job description

World Wide Technology is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for AI Advanced Development to lead a small, high‑impact team charged with turning bold AI questions into decisions rather than demos.

You will write, run and evaluate code, coach engineers, and present clear, data‑driven recommendations to executive leadership—often without intermediaries—and help shape faster, responsible AI adoption across the company.