Required Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background with the ability to build working systems yourself, not only direct others to build them.
• Demonstrated experience building AI-native applications - LLM integration, agents, retrieval, evaluation harnesses, and automation workflows.
• Track record of moving from an ambiguous question to a defensible technical recommendation on a short timeline.
• Experience leading senior engineers, including hiring, setting technical direction, and holding a high bar.
• Demonstrated judgment about when a technology is ready and when it is not - including examples of work you stopped, and why.
• Proficiency with modern backend and cloud technologies (e.g., Python and/or JavaScript/TypeScript, APIs, event-driven systems, containerized deployment).
• Experience designing evaluations for non-deterministic systems, and comfort reasoning about cost, latency, and failure modes.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with demonstrated experience presenting directly to executive leadership and defending a recommendation under scrutiny.
• Ability to structure and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to senior, non-technical audiences, and to state uncertainty plainly rather than hiding it.
• High tolerance for ambiguity, and the discipline to time-box work rather than let it expand.
• Willingness to hand work away once the question is answered, and to let another team own the outcome.
• Solid understanding of Agile and iterative delivery models.
• Deep alignment with and commitment to the WWT Core Values.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field preferred; equivalent experience will be considered.

Certain states and localities require employers to post a reasonable estimate of the salary range. A reasonable estimate of the current base pay range for this position is $140,400 to $210,000 annually. Actual salary will be based on a variety of factors, including shift, location, experience, skill set, performance, licensure and certification, and business needs. The range for this position in other geographic locations may differ. Certain positions may also be eligible for variable incentive compensation, such as bonuses or commissions, that are not included in the base pay.

The well-being of WWT employees is essential. When it comes to our benefits package, WWT has one of the best. We offer the following benefits to all full-time employees:

• Health and Wellbeing: Health (Medical & Prescription), Dental, and Vision Care, Onsite Health Centers (MO & IL), Employee Assistance Program, Wellness program
• Financial Benefits: Competitive Pay, Profit Sharing, 401k Plan with Company Matching, Life and Disability Insurance, Flexible Spending Accounts, Tuition Reimbursement
• Paid Time Off: PTO & Holidays, Parental Leave, Medical Leave, Military Leave, Bereavement, Day of Caring
• Additional Perks: Family Planning Benefits, Nursing Mothers Benefits, Voluntary Legal, Voluntary Supplemental Accident/Illness/Hospital, Voluntary ID Theft, Pet Insurance, Employee Discount Program

Note: This is not an all-encompassing list and should not be used as a complete description of the plan's benefits. For more information, see our US Benefits Website

What will you be doing?

As a Senior Engineering Manager - AI Advanced Development you will lead a new, deliberately small team that answers the AI questions nobody else in the organization owns. Executive asks and emerging technology come to this team; you take them, prove out in weeks what is real and what is not, and hand the answer to the team that will run it - or kill the bet and say clearly why.

This team does not run anything in production and does not own long-term support. That constraint is the point: it is what allows the team to move at the speed of the technology. Your job is to make sure every piece of work ends in a decision rather than a demo.

This is a hands-on role. You will manage the team and still build - writing code, running evaluations, and pressure-testing your engineers' conclusions yourself rather than relying on status reports. You are the first hire on the team, and you will hire Applied AI Engineers who join you.

Exceptional communication is a core requirement of this role, and you will present findings and recommendations directly to executive leaders - often without an intermediary and often when the answer is not the one they were hoping for. You must be able to take a technically complex, uncertain result and give a senior audience a clear recommendation, the reasoning behind it, and an honest account of what you do not yet know.

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 - and know when each is genuinely ready.
• 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 - and route it to the right team.
• Present findings, tradeoffs, and recommendations directly to executive leadership - in writing and in the room - including the conclusions that are unwelcome.
• Write clearly and concisely for a senior audience: short, decision-oriented documents that stand on their own without a walkthrough.
• Coach and develop senior engineers through clear expectations, direct feedback, and servant leadership.

How this role is measured

Success in this role is not measured in shipped features or systems under management. It is measured by decisions made, bets killed early, and handoffs accepted by the teams that receive them. If you need production ownership to feel that your work matters, this is the wrong role.