Senior AI Engineering Manager

Sri Lanka Design Center - Senior AI Engineering Manager Position

Location: Colombo, Sri Lanka (Remote Preferred)

Employment Type: Full-Time

About the Role

We are looking for an exceptional Senior AI Engineering Manager to lead a small but highly talented engineering team building next-generation AI products. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who enjoys solving difficult technical problems while mentoring engineers and helping transform innovative ideas into production-quality software. The ideal candidate combines approximately 5 years of professional software engineering experience with 2–4 years of practical Artificial Intelligence experience, particularly working with Local Large Language Models (LLMs), modern AI tooling, and AI-powered applications. You will work closely with engineering teams and leadership across multiple international regions, helping establish engineering excellence, strong execution, and a collaborative, high-performance culture. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys startup environments where speed, ownership, innovation, and continuous learning are highly valued. The ideal candidate must speak good English, be able to work remotely but within reasonable distance of Colombo.

a) Key Responsibilities & Competencies

Engineering Leadership & Management

• Lead and mentor a team of AI and software engineers based in Colombo.
• Outstanding leadership skills & Strong technical judgement
• Excellent coaching and mentoring ability and solid organization skills
• High integrity & Values
• Calm under pressure with Exceptional communication skills
• Strong decision-making capability and Ability to prioritize effectively
• Create an environment focused on collaboration, innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Conduct code reviews and provide technical coaching.
• Help recruit, interview, and onboard high-quality engineering talent.
• Drive engineering best practices across the team.

Technical Leadership & Skills

• Design and oversee scalable AI software architectures.
• Guide implementation of production-grade AI systems.
• Work with modern AI software engineering methodologies and DevOps practices and Ensure high standards for software quality, testing, security, and maintainability.
• Balance rapid product development with long-term architectural quality.
• Strong experience with the following technologies:
• Programming; Python, C+, JavaScript / TypeScript, SQL
• AI & Machine Learning;
• Local LLM deployment; Hugging Face ecosystem – Ollama, Model serving and inference optimization, Prompt engineering, RAG pipelines, Vector databases and Fine-tuning workflows
• AI multi-agent frameworks, Model fine-tuning, LoRA and QLoRA techniques, AI inference optimization, Model evaluation and Benchmarking
• AI Hardware deployment and optimization
• Local AI deployment on MAC/Windows/Ios/Android environments
• Experience with open-source models such as: Llama, Qwen, Mistral, Gemma, DeepSeek is highly desirable.
• Software Engineering; REST APIs, Microservices, Docker, Git, CI/CD pipelines, Performance optimization. Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud is beneficial but not essential. System integration and test experience

b) Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline (Master's degree is a plus).
• Approximately 5 years of professional software engineering experience.
• 2–4 years of practical AI engineering experience.
• Previous experience leading or managing software engineering teams.
• Strong understanding of modern software architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience building cloud-based and on-premise software platforms.
• Excellent knowledge of software development life cycles and Agile methodologies.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills.

c) Personal Attributes

We are looking for someone who:

• Is an exceptional team player. Has an entrepreneurial mindset and enjoys building products from the ground up.
• Is highly execution focused and delivers results. Takes ownership and accountability. Works well in a fast-paced startup environment.
• Is willing to work hard to achieve ambitious goals.
• Is naturally curious and passionate about emerging AI technologies. Continuously learns and improves.
• Has excellent spoken and written English.
• Can build strong relationships across cultures and geographic regions.
• Thrives when solving complex technical challenges.
• Works effectively with engineering teams and business leaders across multiple countries and time zones. Participate in technical planning, roadmap discussions, and product strategy. Clearly communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Foster a collaborative engineering culture across regions.