AI/ML Engineering Manager

Caylent is an AI-first cloud services company that helps organizations turn ambitious ideas into meaningful business impact. As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and a charter member of Anthropic’s Claude Partner Network, we combine deep expertise in AWS, artificial intelligence, and Anthropic’s Claude platform to help customers modernize their technology, build intelligent products, and move AI from experimentation into production. Our capabilities span generative and agentic AI, cloud migration and modernization, cloud-native application development, data and analytics, DevOps, managed services, security and compliance, and customer experience transformation. At Caylent, our people always come first. We are a fully remote global company with employees in Canada, the United States and Latin America. We celebrate the culture of each of our team members and foster a community of technological curiosity. Come talk to us to learn more about what it means to be a Caylien! The Mission This is a senior role for someone who leads from both directions at once — deeply technical on customer engagements, and fully accountable for the growth and performance of a team of ML engineers and architects. You will report to the Director of AI/ML. You own hiring, development, and team health alongside leading complex customer engagements, shaping architecture, and driving pre-sales. Both parts of this job are real and ongoing. The right candidate will find energy in that combination, not tension. Your Assignment Leading Your Team • Hire and build: Set the technical bar for ML roles on your team, lead or oversee technical assessments, and make hiring decisions you can stand behind. Build a team that raises the practice's overall standard. • Develop people: Run regular structured 1:1s, provide candid feedback at meaningful milestones, and actively invest in each person's growth — whether they are early in their career or highly experienced. • Manage performance: Recognize strong contributors and address performance gaps directly and early. Partner with HRBPs and the Director of AI/ML when situations require a structured path, and advocate for your team when they deserve it. • Stay close to staffing: Understand how your team is utilized across engagements, keep the staffing team informed of each person's skills evolution and preferences, and ensure people are placed in work that stretches them appropriately. Strategic Advisory • Lead ML assessments: Evaluate customer environments end-to-end — infrastructure, data pipelines, model lifecycle, and organizational readiness — and produce recommendations that drive executive decisions and open the door to the next engagement. • Shape architecture: Serve as the senior technical authority on engagements, setting architectural direction, ensuring technical quality across the team, and making the calls that matter when tradeoffs are hard. • Advise on ML operations: Help customers build ML systems they can actually own and sustain — translating MLOps, LLMOps, and production monitoring complexity into standards their engineering teams can execute and their leadership can act on. • Drive pre-sales: Partner with sales and solutions teams during scoping and proposal phases, contributing the technical depth needed to scope work accurately and give prospects confidence in Caylent's ability to deliver. Hands-On Delivery • Lead engagements end-to-end: Drive architecture and solution design from kickoff through delivery — setting technical direction, unblocking the team on hard problems, and ensuring the work meets Caylent's quality standards. • Own the technical relationship: Depending on the engagement, you are either the primary client contact owning all architect-level outcomes, or the senior tec