Applied AI Engineer - Manager

Job description

## **Who We Are** Percepta’s mission is to **transform critical institutions with applied AI.** We care that industries that power the world (e.g. healthcare, manufacturing, energy) benefit from frontier technology. To make that happen, we embed with industry-leading customers to drive AI transformation. We bring together[:](https://challenge.percepta.ai) - Forward-deployed expertise in engineering, product, and research - Mosaic, our in-house toolkit for rapidly deploying agentic workflows - Strategic partnerships with Anthropic, McKinsey, AWS, companies within the General Catalyst portfolio, and more Our team is a quickly growing group of Applied AI Engineers, Embedded Product Managers and Researchers motivated by diffusing the promise of AI into improvements we can feel in our day to day lives. Percepta is a direct partnership with General Catalyst, a global transformation and investment company. ## About The Role We're hiring a player-coach Engineering Manager to help us grow our incredible engineers who are tackling our customers’ hardest problems. Our Applied AI Engineers embed directly with customer teams. They own delivery, sit with operators and executives and ship production AI systems into environments nobody would describe as clean. You will help scale the growth of our Applied AI engineers by managing a small team (to start) of engineers across one of our customer engagements. Your primary output is their trajectory: What they can own in 6 months that they can't own today. Everyone at Percepta is a builder, and you'll still be writing code. Expect to be in a codebase most weeks, reviewing designs, pairing on the gnarly parts, and stepping in directly when a launch is at risk. **This isn't a coding-optional role**. It’s a player-coach role because we strongly believe in staying close to the work. Your engineers are making architecture calls inside unfamiliar enterprise systems under real time pressure. It’s hard to do that from the outside, so you will have to be able to dig into the weeds when needed. The balance shifts week to week. During a rollout you're closer to the code. Between rollouts you're closer to your people. Both are the job. You'll partner with an Engagement Lead on customer strategy and with Growth Leads on each engineer's development, so you're not carrying the whole picture alone. You'll also be one of the leading voices on what Mosaic should become, because you'll be deeply embedded with the problems, and be intimately familiar with where the pain points are. ## What You'll Do **Grow engineers, deliberately.** Have a real point of view on where each person is today and where they could be in 6 to 12 months, then aim their work at the overlap between what they're interested in, what they need to build, and what the business actually needs. Stretch assignments should be work that matters, not busywork dressed up as development. **Ramp people properly.** Invest heavily up front: Learn about your direct reports, their learning and working style, how they operate, and how to best partner together. Get live context on the customer and the industry, heavily pairing in the first few weeks, co-attending every customer meeting for the first two (shadow, reverse shadow, then they lead). We want to make sure Percepta is the best place to work, and that there is unprecedented opportunity to grow a career here. Help your direct report learn their strengths, where to focus, and how to succeed in the ambiguity that is a high growth tech environment. **Give feedback in the moment.** If a design approach is off or code quality is slipping, say so immediately, specifically and with respect. Bi-weekly 1:1s that go both directions. If someone has five things to work on, sequence them over months instead of dumping all five in one sitting. **Own the technical outcome.** The buck stops with you across every workstream on your team, including the ones you delegated. Delegation is expected; abdication isn't. You should have enough context to know something is off before it becomes a crisis. **Make the hard technical calls.** Be the final decision-maker on the choices that are expensive to reverse, and be clear when a decision has been made and who made it. Document the why. Decide with incomplete information when that's what's available, and say what you assumed. **Set the bar.** Define your team's standards for code quality, testing, review rigor, and documentation. Unstated standards are just preferences people have to guess at. You don't need to review every PR, but review enough to know what's actually shipping. **Be credible with customers.** You own the technical relationship. That trust gets built through consistent delivery and good questions, not through impressive decks. When something breaks, you're the grounding presence in the room. **Feed the field back into the product.** Patterns you see on the ground (what's breaking, what's asked for constantly, what nobody touches) are signal. Surface them proactively and push the reusable parts back into Mosaic so the next deployment starts further along. **Hire.** You'll interview, you'll help calibrate the loop, and you'll shape who we bring in next. ## What We're Looking For - 7+ years building production software, with at least 2 leading or managing engineers. Titles don’t matter: TLs who have been doing this work, please apply - You still write code and you want to keep writing code. Python and TypeScript specifically, since that's our stack and our interview loop - A track record you can point at: An engineer who got noticeably better because of how you managed them. Be specific about what changed - Systems taste. You can explain why a design is shaped the way it is, where it'll strain, and what you'd trade off. Opinionated beats default - Comfort operating in ambiguity, and the instinct to poke at unfamiliar systems rather than wait to be shown around - Real product empathy. You think about how people will actually use the thing, what it costs them to adopt it, and how to integrate without wrecking their workflow - Fluency with LLMs as an engineering surface: Agents, tools, context, evals, and the AI dev tooling your team uses daily - You can be direct with someone and have them come away trusting you more. Candor and kindness aren't in tension here - Strong communication with non-technical stakeholders. Lead with the answer, then the caveats ## Nice To Have - Managed a team through a production launch inside someone else's enterprise environment - Enterprise integration scar tissue (EHRs, ERPs, RCM, supply chain, workforce systems) - Domain depth in healthcare, energy, manufacturing, or financial services - Prior forward-deployed, consulting, or design partner work - Built tooling or frameworks that multiple teams depended on - Startup or founding engineer background ## Location And Travel New York based. Expect a couple of days a month on site with a customer, more when a deployment needs it or when someone on your team needs you in the room. We'd rather commit to that number and occasionally exceed it than advertise "minimal travel" and surprise you. We’re working against an incredibly ambitious mission. It won’t be easy, but it will likely be the most fulfilling work of your career. If this excites you, let's chat, even if you don't meet all of the qualifications above. ## **Our Values** **Dream bigger:** We have the unique privilege of taking on the most ambitious problems and we should chase them with optimism, responsibility, and genuine belief that we can make it happen. We have to embrace the hard things when no one else will. **Heart in the game:** What we're doing matters and we have to give a shit. Internally, that means fixing badness when you find it. Externally, it means honoring the trust our customers place in us with their most important problems. This isn’t a 9-5, nor is it a job we’re ever going to monitor your hours. We promise to put work in front of you that matters and in return, we ask you to promise to care. **Win for the customer:** Everyone is an engineer and the job of an engineer is to deliver outcomes, not outputs. Everything we do—the products we build, the partnerships we launch, the strategy we set—exists to make our customers successful. Delivery is the strategy. **Make the call:** Organizations are only as strong as the pace at which they make decisions. Everyone at Percepta should feel empowered to commit and shape the ambiguity in front of them. But "make the call" cuts both ways: make the decision *and* make the phone call. High-agency decision-making only works with high-bandwidth communication and we commit to never operate in silos. **Intensity with kindness:** We believe in excellence in execution, candor in feedback, ruthlessness in prioritization, and survivalist urgency. We also believe you don't need to be an asshole to deliver on any of this. The trust built through shared kindness and vulnerability is what makes the intensity sustainable.