AI Software Development Manager

JSI

$120K — $150K *
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years software engineering experience
  • 5+ years managing engineering teams with direct delivery accountability
  • Proven ability to lead teams through ambiguous roadmaps
  • Experience owning production systems end-to-end
  • Strong design and architecture judgment

Responsibilities

  • Lead and mentor two agile teams of ~10 engineers
  • Hire, develop, and retain high-performing talent
  • Conduct performance management and career development
  • Foster a culture of accountability and collaboration
  • Ensure predictable delivery practices aligned with business objectives
  • Set the technical direction and review architecture decisions
  • Lead AI/ML capabilities delivery across diverse use cases

Benefits

  • Collaborative in-office environment two days a week
  • Opportunity to shape technical direction in AI/ML
  • Engage in hands-on technical decision-making
  • Work on mission-critical AI capabilities
  • Chance to work with a skilled and high-performing team
Full Job Description
We are hiring an experienced Engineering Manager to lead two agile AI/ML teams (~10 engineers total) building production AI capabilities inside our 4Sight platform. You will be accountable for delivery, engineering quality, and team performance, and you will help shape the technical direction in partnership with senior engineering leadership and architects.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. We want a manager who still reads code, engages in design discussions, and exercises real judgment on architecture and trade-offsalongside their teams. You willoperatein a fast-moving AI environment where prioritiesshift,ambiguity is the norm, and the bar for production reliability is high.

Before you apply: this role requires eligibility for a Government of Canada Top Secret security clearance. The position is based in Kanata, Ontario, with at least two days per week of in-office collaboration.

Responsibilities:

Leadership & Team Management

  • Lead, manage, and mentor two agile teams of software developers, data scientists, and AI engineers (~10 direct reports)

  • Hire, develop, andretainhigh-performing engineering talent

  • Conduct performance management, career development, and coaching

  • Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement

  • Set clear expectations and ensure alignment with team and organizational goals

  • Act as an escalation point for team-level challenges and cross-team dependencies


Delivery & Execution

  • Accountable for the delivery outcomes, engineering quality, and performance of both teams

  • Ensure predictable, sustainable delivery practices aligned with business objectives

  • Manage scope, risks, and dependencies across concurrent initiatives

  • Partner with Product Management to translate business goals into executable plans

  • Ensure high-quality releases and effective handling of production issues and support needs

  • Evolve agile practices, testing discipline, and release processes to improve delivery outcomes and team effectiveness over time


Technical Leadership

  • Setand execute the technical direction for your product area

  • Maintain sufficient technical depth to guide design decisions and review critical architecture

  • Partner with senior engineers to ensure sound technical execution and maintainability

  • Identifyand manage technical debt, balancing short-term delivery with long-term system health


AI/ML Execution

  • Lead delivery of AI/ML capabilities across investigative use cases - entity resolution, link analysis, anomaly and pattern detection, NLP on unstructured communications, and similar problems against large, heterogeneous datasets

  • Drive the path from experimentation to production: dataset curation, model evaluation against operational metrics, deployment,monitoringfor drift, and retraining cycles

  • Hold a high bar for model validation in a domain where false positives and false negatives both have real consequences for investigations and the people involved

  • Partner with data and platform teams on the infrastructure that makes production ML reliable - feature stores, evaluation harnesses, observability, and lifecycle tooling

  • Champion responsible-AI practices: bias review, explainability where it matters, auditability, and clear human-in-the-loop boundaries

Required Qualifications:

  • 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing engineering teams with direct delivery accountability

  • Track recordof leading teams through ambiguous, evolving roadmaps where the right answerwasn'tobvious at the start

  • Experience owning production systems end-to-end: release quality, on-call response, and post-incident learning

  • Strong designand architecture judgment - able to engage credibly with senior engineers on technical trade-offs and push back when warranted

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Direct experience managing AI/ML or data engineering teams, not just teamsadjacent tothem

  • Shipped production ML systems and lived with the operational reality - drift, retraining, evaluation, incident response on model behavior

  • Worked with large-scale data infrastructure: streaming pipelines, distributed processing, feature stores, or comparable

  • Background in one or more of: entity resolution, graph/link analysis, NLP, anomaly detection, or geospatial analytics

  • Experience in regulated, mission-critical, or national-security adjacent environments

  • Prior Government of Canada or Five Eyes clearance held in the last 24 months

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at JSI

More Information Technology Jobs

Find similar AI Software Development Manager jobs: