Senior Manager, AI Engineering

About Pryon:
We’re a team of AI, technology, and language experts whose DNA lives in Alexa, Siri, Watson, and virtually every human language technology product on the market. Now we’re building an industry-leading knowledge management and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) platform. Our proprietary, cutting-edge natural language processing capabilities transform unstructured data into meaningful experiences that increase productivity with unmatched accuracy and speed.

Pryon's AI Memory platform powers mission-critical deployments for Fortune 500 enterprises and government agencies. Our sophisticated IRQA (Information Retrieval Question Answering) architecture combines hybrid search (sparse + dense vectors), multi-stage neural scoring, and RAG to deliver unmatched accuracy and speed at petabyte scale.

We're seeking a highly technical Senior Engineering Manager to lead our AI Engineering organization responsible for the core IR platform: data ingestion, retrieval systems, and generative AI capabilities. You'll manage three engineering teams, partner closely with our Research team, and drive technical strategy for Pryon's foundational memory layer technology. This is a critical role where you will be at the forefront of building and scaling the systems that power our data ingestion, retrieval, and generative AI capabilities.

As a key leader in our engineering team, you will manage a team of talented engineers, guiding them in the development of robust data pipelines, sophisticated retrieval systems, and innovative generative models. This is a hands-on leadership position for an individual who is passionate about building high-performing teams and is not afraid to dive deep into technical challenges. We are looking for a leader who can drive technical strategy and execution, not just manage projects and people.

In This Role, You Will::
• Lead and Mentor: Manage and cultivate multiple engineering teams, fostering a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and collaboration. You will be responsible for the growth and development of your managers (if applicable) and individual contributors. Build a high-performing team through effective hiring, coaching, and performance management.
• Technical Strategy and Vision: Drive the IR platform roadmap in partnership with Product and Research teams.
• Execution and Delivery: Oversee the end-to-end software development lifecycle, ensuring timely delivery of high-quality, scalable solutions. You will work closely with product management and other stakeholders to align on priorities and deliverables. Balance feature delivery with technical debt reduction.
• Hands-On Technical Leadership: Serve as a technical expert within the team, guiding architectural discussions, participating in design reviews, review and contribute code when needed, and helping to solve the most complex technical challenges. Your deep understanding of large-scale data ingestion, retrieval systems, and large language models will be crucial. Collaborate with senior architects to ensure consistency and alignment of technical design. You will have to earn respect from your team through the strength of your technical calibre.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product managers, researchers, and other engineering orgs to deliver impactful features and ensure alignment with broader business objectives. Foster strong relationships with the Research team to accelerate innovation pipeline.
• Operational Excellence: Drive improvements in our engineering processes and practices, including CI/CD, monitoring, observability, and support rotations, to ensure the smooth operation of our platform. Establish clear SLOs and incident management processes.
• Team Growth and Culture: Build and scale the AI Engineering organization. Create a culture of learning, psychological safety, and technical excellence.

What You'll Need to Be Successful::
• 7+ years software engineering experience, including 3-5 years managing multiple engineering squads (10+ engineers total)
• Proven track record building information retrieval, AI memory systems at scale
• Deep technical expertise in Information retrieval, vector search, or ranking systems, Distributed data processing and ingestion pipelines, NLP/LLM infrastructure and RAG architectures, Large-scale database optimization (SQL and NoSQL)
• Hands-on experience with the technical stack: Python, Kubernetes, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), vector databases
• Strong people leadership - building high-performing teams, coaching senior ICs (Staff/Principal level), driving technical excellence through mentorship
• Ability to balance short-term delivery with long-term architectural vision and technical debt management
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, Go, or Java
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Understanding of distributed systems, microservices architectures, and their challenges
• Familiarity with MLOps practices and tools (ML Flow, model serving, monitoring)
• Demonstrated ability to hire, lead, and mentor high-performing engineering teams
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Strategic Mindset, with the ability to align technical decisions with business goals and product strategy
• Passion for fostering a collaborative, inclusive, and psychologically safe team environment
• Track record of delivering complex projects on time while maintaining high quality standards

Preferred Qualifications::
• Experience managing both on-prem and cloud deployments
• Background in AI/ML research collaboration or research-to-production pipelines
• Familiarity with specific technologies: OpenSearch, pgvector, Yugabyte, Kafka, FluxCD, LiteLLM
• Prior startup experience (Series A-C growth stage)
• Publications or speaking experience on IR/search/ML/ AI memory systems
• Experience with enterprise and government deployments (compliance, security)
• Coaching: Experience developing engineers from mid-level to senior/staff levels

Benefits for Full Time Employees:
- Remote first organization
- 100% Company paid Health/Dental/Vision benefits for you and your dependents
- Life Insurance, Short-term and Long-term Disability
- 401k
- Unlimited PTO

We are interested in every qualified candidate who is authorized to work in the United States. However, we are not able to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment visas at this time.

Pryon will not consider race, religion, sex, sexual preference, or national origin in ways that violate the Nation's civil rights laws.