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Applied AI Engineer - Manager
Percepta
3 hours ago
Full-time
On-site
East New York, New York, United States
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 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, that 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 dothe products we build, the partnerships we launch, the strategy we setexists 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.
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 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, that 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 dothe products we build, the partnerships we launch, the strategy we setexists 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.