Senior Manager, Software Engineering - AI

Role Description

We are seeking a Senior Manager, Engineering to lead and scale our AI Search engineering team as we build next generation intelligent search capabilities that transform how legal professionals find and surface critical content. Your team owns the embedding models and indexing pipelines that power semantic search, and partners closely with product and vertical teams across NetDocuments to evolve those capabilities for different use cases and industries.

This is a broad AI search mandate. Your team will not work on a single product in isolation but will serve as the core platform layer enabling semantic experiences across the NetDocuments ecosystem. You will drive the engineering vision, mentor engineering leaders, and create an environment where innovation and operational rigor go hand in hand.

This position reports to the Director of Engineering, AI and will partner closely with peers across Product, Architecture, and Data Science to ensure cohesive delivery of enterprise grade AI powered search capabilities.

What You’ll Do

• Drive Strategy & Execution
  • Shape and execute the long term engineering strategy for the AI Search platform, with a focus on embedding model quality, indexing pipeline reliability, and semantic relevance across verticals.
  • Collaborate with Product, Architecture, and vertical engineering teams to translate customer needs into scalable, production ready search capabilities.
  • Build and maintain a robust roadmap that balances platform investments in model improvements and indexing infrastructure with cross team partnership commitments.
  • Oversee delivery execution across multiple teams to ensure high quality, on time releases.
• Lead & Develop High Performing Teams
  • Manage and mentor Engineers and Technical staff, fostering a culture of trust, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
  • Guide hiring, performance management, and career development to build diverse, high impact teams.
  • Create an environment that attracts top engineering talent and empowers them to deliver their best work.
• Cross Functional Collaboration & Stakeholder Management
  • Partner with vertical product and engineering teams to understand domain specific search requirements and adapt semantic capabilities accordingly.
  • Serve as the technical point of contact for AI Search capabilities, helping stakeholders understand tradeoffs in relevance, latency, and model selection.
  • Present technical strategies, roadmaps, and progress to senior leadership in clear, business focused terms.
  • Drive engagement and communication across distributed teams and business units.
• Technical Leadership & Oversight
  • Maintain strong working knowledge of embedding models, vector indexing, and semantic retrieval while focusing on guiding teams rather than day to day coding.
  • Champion best practices for model lifecycle management, indexing pipeline design, relevance evaluation, and scalable architecture.
  • Ensure AI Search solutions are designed securely and meet compliance, performance, privacy, and data residency standards.
  • Promote responsible experimentation with emerging AI and retrieval technologies, balancing innovation with production stability.
• Culture & Innovation
  • Foster a growth mindset, continuous learning, and experimentation within the engineering organization.
  • Cultivate a collaborative engineering culture that values quality, innovation, and transparency.
  • Encourage contributions to open source projects and knowledge sharing across the company.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (advanced degree preferred).
• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in engineering management roles.
• Demonstrated success managing multiple teams or a group of 7+ engineers and leaders.
• Proven ability to define and execute a technical vision in alignment with business strategy.
• Strong experience leading distributed, cloud based product development (Azure or AWS).
• Familiarity with machine learning model deployment and lifecycle management, particularly embedding or NLP models.
• Experience building or owning data pipelines at scale including indexing, transformation, or ETL workflows.
• Deep understanding of modern engineering practices including CI/CD, microservices, and scalable architectures.
• Excellent stakeholder management and executive communication skills, with experience navigating cross team dependencies.
• Ability to synthesize complex technical information and present it effectively to leadership and cross functional audience.

What Will Make You Stand Out

• Hands on experience with semantic search or dense vector retrieval including embedding model selection, or hybrid search.
• Experience with Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.
• Familiarity with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and how search quality feeds downstream LLM applications.
• Background in information retrieval, natural language processing.
• Experience adapting a shared platform capability across multiple product verticals or customer segments.
• A history of building high performing, engaged teams that deliver impactful software.

Benefits

• The People!
• 90% healthcare premiums company covered.
• HSA company contribution.
• 401K match at 4% with immediate vesting.
• Flexible PTO (typically 3 to 4 weeks a year).
• 10 paid holidays.
• Monthly contributions for life activities & wellness.
• Access to LinkedIn learning with monthly dedicated time to explore.
• Compensation Transparency: The compensation range for this position is: $190,000 - $215,000.

Equal Opportunity

NetDocuments is an Equal Opportunity Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. All employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements, individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, (including pregnancy), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, military and veteran status, or any other status protected by laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. NetDocuments believes diversity and inclusion among our employees is critical to our success, and we are committed to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment.