Manager, Applied AI Engineering

Overview

Impact the Moment

At McGraw Hill, our mission is to unlock the full potential of every learner. This role puts you at the center of that mission, applying cutting‑edge AI to products used by millions of students and educators. We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Manager, Applied AI Engineering to join our innovative team. The ideal candidate will possess extensive expertise in building and delivering highly scalable full stack AI-powered applications and providing engineering leadership and mentorship to high-performance AI-native engineering teams.

As an Applied AI Engineering Manager at McGraw Hill, you provide leadership and technical guidance to your teams, have a sense of personal accountability, a curiosity to research new technologies and methodologies, and a pervasive desire to dig into complex issues while respecting timelines and team commitments. As a people manager, you have a strong desire and motivation to grow the individuals on your team and the team as a whole.

Practical, hands‑on experience in generative AI and a deep understanding of its principles and latest advancements are essential, as you will be expected to personally step in as tech lead on the organization's most strategic AI initiatives.

This is a remote position open to applicants authorized to work for any employer within the United States.

What You’ll Do

• Operate as both a people manager and an individual technical contributor/tech lead, shifting between the two as project needs demand.
• Act as hands‑on tech lead on the organization's most strategic enterprise AI initiatives, designing agentic and LLM-based systems firsthand and stepping in directly to resolve the team's hardest technical problems.
• Manage AI‑native engineers and teams that move quickly and operate with high autonomy using modern AI tooling (copilots, agents, etc.).
• Own the team's AI token and compute budget, driving cost efficiency and responsible usage across AI tooling and infrastructure.
• Set technical standards for prompt engineering, RAG, agent orchestration, and evaluation of AI systems across the team.
• Drive software engineering excellence through coding, pair programming, code/architecture reviews, and comprehensive solution design.
• Manage stakeholder relationships and ensure the team's work meets compliance, application security, and data privacy standards alongside business requirements.
• Apply automation and CI/CD processes to enable smoother releases.
• Facilitate career development for your team through mentorship, identifying training opportunities, and skill‑building.

About You:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience in Software engineering, with at least 2 years in a leadership or management role.
• You have led teams of individual contributor engineers, coming from an engineering background yourself - with strong empathy, communication, and interpersonal skills, balancing the realities of the business with the needs of your team.
• You interface well with other business units and leadership, being able to describe situations and technical approaches to foster an environment of trust and confidence.
• You have practical, hands‑on experience building and shipping production‑grade LLM or agentic applications at enterprise scale, with a deep understanding of generative AI principles and the latest advancements.
• You have proven experience in designing, developing, and implementing complex software applications, with deep expertise across front‑end and back‑end development and the full software development life cycle - including application code, testing, documentation, and performance/security engineering.
• You have an ability to seamlessly shift focus between diverse projects and priorities in a dynamic work environment, managing multiple initiatives concurrently without compromising quality or focus.
• You have experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and modern development tools and methodologies.
• You can work in a fast‑paced software release environment, where you continuously deliver production‑grade (near‑zero downtime, fault‑tolerant, etc.) software daily for a system with millions of users around the world.

We have a very diverse stack that can vary across teams and projects. Some of the technologies we use include:

• Back‑end: Python, Go, Node.js
• Front‑end: TypeScript, Angular, React and Playwright
• AI services such as Azure AI Search, Azure OpenAI service, Amazon Bedrock or similar technologies.
• Agent frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen/CrewAI), vector databases (Pinecone, pgvector), and AI observability/eval tooling (LangSmith etc).
• Amazon Web Services (AWS): ECS, RDS, Lambda, and many other services
• CI/CD and Infrastructure: Docker, Terraform, Github, CircleCI, Sonarqube, NewRelic and Datadog
• Collaboration: JIRA, Confluence, Zoom, Slack, and Office 365
• Databases: Relational databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL; NoSQL databases such as DynamoDB

Why McGraw Hill?

• We firmly believe in the mission of educating students and helping them succeed.
• Our teams operate in a collaborative and safe environment where everyone's input is valued, trusted, and respected.
• You'll have opportunity for horizontal and vertical movement and growth throughout the organization, including clear career paths for your long term personal and professional growth.
• You'll be at the forefront of applying generative AI, agentic systems, and enterprise-scale LLM applications to transform how millions of students, teachers, and administrators learn and work.
• We have a mindset of "deliver value, not features": we produce meaningful products and services for our students, teachers, administrators, and others that further our educational mission.

Why work for us?

The work you do at McGraw Hill will be work that matters. We are collectively building experiences that will help shape the future of education. Play your part and experience a sense of fulfilment that will inspire you to even greater heights.

The pay range for this position is between $140,000 - $190,000 annually, however, base pay offered may vary depending on job‑related knowledge, skills, experience, and location. An annual bonus plan may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical and/or other benefits, depending on the position offered. Click here to learn more about our benefit offerings.