AI/ML Manager

Your Responsibilities

what you will wake up to solve.

• Process-First AI Strategy: Principal Technical Expert: Act as a hands-on leader and the core technical authority tasked with "futurifying" client businesses through advanced AI. Take full ownership of the AI Engineering squad, transforming ambitious concepts into high-impact, tangible realities.
• Engineering & Intelligent Deployment: Execute the full-lifecycle development of innovative AI/ML solutions, including hands-on design, coding, testing, and deployment of robust, scalable systems that prioritize technical excellence and business relevance.
• Scalability & Architectural Optimization: Directly build and optimize high-performance AI architectures and core system components to ensure solutions are reliable, production-ready, and optimized for long-term operational success.
• Impact-Driven Technical Expertise: Deliver intelligent client outcomes through direct technical contribution, maintaining an "Always Beta" mindset and a relentless focus on solving complex engineering challenges.
• Leadership through Action: Lead by example rather than control, coaching and mentoring a high-performing squad of "happier Do-ers" to foster a vibrant culture of continuous innovation and technical excellence.
• Strategic Integration & Collaboration: Partner across internal teams to translate chaotic business challenges into precise technical requirements, ensuring seamless solution integration and adoption for global clients.
• The "Agentic" Shift: You will lead the transition from simple predictive models to Agentic Workflows. You will build systems where AI agents can plan, reason, and execute complex tasks autonomously to solve intricate business problems.
• Talent & Culture: You will mentor a high-performance squad of AI Engineers and Data Scientists. You will teach them to look beyond the algorithm and understand the business outcome.

Functional Skills

1. Scaling Intelligent Workforce through Delivery Excellence

• Deep Technical Acumen: Operates at the cutting edge of AI, applying advanced technical knowledge to engineer and implement groundbreaking solutions, and guide the squad in developing future capabilities.
• Client Advocacy & Revenue Growth: Skill in cultivating and maintaining trusted client partnerships. Drives strategic engagement that results in repeat business and expanded client portfolios within the region.
• Contract & Risk Governance: High proficiency in reviewing and managing complex project agreements (SoW), mitigating delivery risks, and navigating commercial negotiations to safeguard BU profitability.
• Structured Problem-Solving: Simplifies chaotic technical challenges for the squad by breaking them into solvable chunks using first-principles thinking.
• Squad Delivery Ownership: Follows through on the squad's solution execution—owning technical outcomes from ideation to deployment with rigor, precision, and pride, ensuring tangible, real-world business value.

2. Technical Oversight & Execution Charter

• Technical Troubleshooting & Crisis Resolution: Actively manages technical roadblocks within the squad, personally intervening to troubleshoot ML or MLOps constraints. You ensure the protection of sprint timelines and the guaranteed performance of deployed models through hands-on problem-solving.
• Cloud-Native Technical Command: Maintains deep, functional knowledge of modern AI system design (e.g., RAG Frameworks, Agentic Workflows, and Inference Optimization) across GCP and AWS. You hold the responsibility to validate squad-level technical roadmaps, ensuring they are technically feasible and production-hardened.
• End-to-End Project Management: Expertly manage all aspects of a project, including scope, budget, timelines, and stakeholder communication. Accountable for the entire delivery, not just the technical parts.
• Talent Strategy & Mentorship: Drive the hiring and development of specialized talent. You will be responsible for defining and optimizing effective team structures while proactively fostering an environment that champions creative problem-solving and technical agility.

Tech Superpowers

• Deep AI Engineering Mastery & Guidance: Possesses profound, hands-on expertise in engineering, optimizing, and deploying foundational models, custom AI solutions, and complex multi-modal systems. You'll also guide your squad in understanding model architectures, training methodologies, and ethical AI development from the ground up, ensuring their collective proficiency.
• Intelligent Systems Architecture & Oversight: You'll directly contribute to and oversee the coding and implementation of robust, scalable, and production-grade AI platforms and MLOps components for your squad's projects. You'll translate abstract technical requirements into high-performance, maintainable AI system designs, always considering reliability, security, and future extensibility across the squad's work.
• Cloud-Native AI capability: More than cloud-certified, you are deeply cloud-capable in applied AI engineering. You proficiently leverage and guide your team in utilizing leading cloud AI/ML ecosystems to build, deploy, and manage AI solutions.
• Technical Integrity & Ethical Governance: Establishes and audits mandatory technical quality benchmarks, ensuring strict adherence to rigorous policies regarding model validation, automated testing coverage, and ethical governance.

Experience & Relevance

• A value-driven AI/ML Engineering Manager with 8+ years of experience in building and scaling end-to-end AI engineering and solution delivery.
• Leadership Track Record: Proven track record as a hands-on builder, and lead, contributing to the design, development, and deployment of complex, enterprise-grade AI/ML platforms and solutions. Expert in leveraging Google Cloud's AI/ML ecosystem (Vertex AI, BigQuery ML, GKE for MLOps) to deliver highly performant, scalable, and impactful AI transformations.
• Delivery & Advisory Record: Experience in building and optimizing intelligent systems and personally driving the technical execution from conception to scalable deployment.
• Applied AI & Domain Expertise: Hands-On AI Deployment: Extensive hands-on experience deploying AI-powered workflows, copilots, and automation solutions in production environments.
• Client-Facing Lead: Demonstrated hands-on experience as an AI/ML Product Manager, Data Science Manager, or Technical Architect in client-facing capacities. This involves directly building, implementing, and advising on complex AI solutions, consistently acting as the trusted technical authority for strategic clients.

Bonus Points (you will thrive if you have)

• Founder’s Energy: Bias for action, thrive in ambiguity, relentless focus on outcomes.
• Low-Code/No-Code Fluency: Experience with AI integrations via Power Platform or similar.
• AI Copilots & Extensions: Built plugins, copilots, or agentic automation frameworks.
• Thought Leadership DNA: Industry content creation, technical blogs, public speaking.
• Ethical Compass: Strong commitment to responsible AI practices.
• Engineer at Heart: Background in product development or engineering before moving into architecture.

Why you’ll love being a ‘Searcian’

NOT your ‘usual’ management consultancy; we ‘solve differently’.

• We are happier. No really happier’: A vibrant, inclusive, and supportive work environment. We even have a dedicated role for ‘Better Living’.
• The Company You Keep (Says Everything): solvers. engineers. tinkerers. improvers. futurists operating across 12 countries.
• No room for CAVEers (Constantly Against Virtually Everything people). Instead, we make room for a meditation room in our offices.
• No bloat: 27 people meeting with 23 clueless people. Not happening here. We also don't do the meetings to plan for pre-meetings.
• No bureaucracy. Zero entropy. Real decision-making velocity: We’re large enough to solve the world’s most complex business challenges, yet small and agile enough to value individual humans. With us, you’re a name, not an employee ID number lost in a sea of 37,000 people where it takes a year just to decide ‘who will decide’.
• Ideas over Hierarchy: We reject HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). The most well-reasoned ideas win - regardless of whose name is on them. That dangerous phrase, "We’ve always done it this way," dies here.
• Own-the-outcome: The buck stops with you. Doesn’t matter if you are an intern. (Psst: A ‘real intern’ actually drafted this JD.)
• Expert ‘wholesome generalists’, Not ‘one-nut-tighteners’. At Searce, you see the whole picture — how the car is designed, built, and driven — not just how to tighten the third nut on a red 1962 Ford Falcon owned by Vinny’s cousin. Real impact comes from knowing why that nut matters to the person behind the wheel.
• You ‘do stuff’ that matters. Not just “follow up on the deck we shared.”
• Gain more years in your Searce-perience: We operate at a 3.65x experience velocity—yes, we measured it. (and charted it to the scale too)

Join the ‘real solvers’

ready to futurify?

If you are excited by the possibilities of what an AI-native engineering-led, modern tech consultancy can do to futurify businesses, apply here and experience the ‘Art of the possible’. Don’t Just Send a Resume. Send a Statement.