Manager, AI Engineering and Vendor Operations

The role

This person will manage and mentor a team of AI engineers and lead technical planning for AI Labs engineering work. They will also oversee the evaluation, deployment, and day-to-day management of AI tools and vendors.

What you will do

• Manage and mentor a team of entry and mid-level AI engineers
• Lead technical planning, scoping, and sprint execution for AI Labs engineering work
• Develop AI coding frameworks, practices, and expectations
• Review designs and code to keep systems maintainable and secure
• Build and maintain automated testing and model evaluation practices
• Coordinate response to production bugs and infrastructure incidents
• Lead technical evaluations of AI vendors, models, and tools
• Participate in NPR-wide AI tool reviews with IT Security
• Manage day-to-day relationships with selected AI vendors and tools
• Track vendor usage, spend, and renewal dates against budget

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and shipping production AI or machine learning systems
• Deep hands-on knowledge of large language models and the systems built around them
• 2+ years of experience managing or mentoring engineers
• Experience setting engineering practices for a team
• Experience working with technology vendors and managing software tools
• Experience building automated testing for AI model outputs
• Hands-on experience building in a major cloud environment (Azure, AWS, or GCP)
• Experience working across technical and non-technical teams
• Strong Python skills
• Working knowledge of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and semantic search
• Proficiency in design and architecture of AI systems and systems of AI evaluation
• Proficiency in SQL and cloud data warehouses such as BigQuery or Snowflake

Nice to have

• Experience in a media organization, newsroom, or public service institution
• Experience onboarding staff into a new or growing team
• Experience designing harnesses for AI coding agents
• Experience working with procurement, legal, or vendor risk teams on technology reviews

Benefits

• Medical
• Dental
• Vision
• Life/ accidental death and dismemberment
• Long-term disability
• Short-term disability
• Voluntary retirement savings
• Access to health and wellness
• Paid time off
• Financial well-being

About the company

NPR is a mission-driven multimedia organization that produces news, information, and music programming in partnership with independent public radio stations.