Manager, Software Develoment - Generative AI

Manager, Software Development - Generative AI - Hybrid, Glasgow, UK

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About the job

GenAI is the #2 R&D priority at SAS, and we're excited to announce a fantastic opportunity within Platform Services in Foundation R&D. We are on the hunt for a manager to lead the engineering team responsible for SAS’s central Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities-technology that will be at the heart of how SAS products and teams securely discover, retrieve, and use trusted information.

In this pivotal role, you will lead a talented team at the forefront of GenAI and information retrieval. Your mission will be to build, own, and evolve the robust RAG platform that enables SAS products, solutions, and internal teams to ingest, index, search, and ground AI experiences in public and enterprise documents. Through your leadership, teams across SAS will be able to create accurate, secure, and scalable GenAI features more quickly.

This is an opportunity to shape the future of enterprise RAG at SAS, transforming how we connect trusted knowledge with GenAI to serve our customers and stakeholders.

As the SAS RAG Engineering manager, you will:

• Organize, develop, prioritize, and assign resources to deliver high quality, testable and scalable software solutions within established timelines, while adhering to R&D best practices and processes.
• Lead development project designs and enforce technical standards to ensure solutions execute correctly across various supported environments (i.e. browsers, devices, operating systems).
• Proactively lead and solicit the involvement of other project stakeholders (e.g. managers, developers, user interface and visual designers, product managers) to ensure implementation satisfies functional requirements and is consistent with established R&D standards.
• Manage and lead project scoping and scheduling; track progress of individual tasks and alert executive management and stakeholders of concerns meeting schedules, while following established R&D standards.
• Manage product quality standards by ensuring functional, unit and performance testing is comprehensive and thorough; work closely with development and testing teams to verify test plans. Organize, prioritize, and assign resources to implement and resolve code changes related to enhancements, redesigns, and/or bug fixes.
• Contribute to product or project direction through collaboration with Product Management, Marketing, Sales, Customers, and others within SAS.
• Manage all aspects of the department including teamwork, performance management, feedback, professional growth through collaboration with SAS human resources, SAS education, and executive leadership.
• Ensure all applicable security policies and processes are followed to support the organization's secure software development goals.
• Embrace curiosity, passion, authenticity, and accountability. These are our values and influence everything we do.

Required qualifications

• At least 8 years of experience in related programming or testing, including one year of project lead, supervisory, or management experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field, preferably computer science, math, or statistics.
• Strong knowledge in generative AI, including languages such as Golang, python or similar.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and develop software engineers, set clear goals and expectations, provide timely feedback, manage performance, support career growth, and build an inclusive, accountable engineering culture.
• Strong decision-making and problem-solving ability
• Skilled leadership in projects and adapting to changing priorities or deadlines
• Proof of right to work in the UK
• Equivalent combination of related education, training and experience may be considered in place of the above qualifications.

Additional competencies, knowledge, and skills

• Fostering a work environment that encourages people to act with integrity and treat each other and their ideas with respect; creating and protecting a high-trust environment by setting an example, advocating for others in the face of challenges, removing barriers to trust, and rewarding others for demonstrating behaviours that cultivate trust.
• Identifying and leveraging opportunities to accelerate results and build capability by assigning tasks and decision-making responsibilities to individuals or teams with clear boundaries, expectations, support, and follow-up.
• Obtaining information and identifying key issues and relationships relevant to achieving a long-range goal; committing to a course of action to accomplish a long-range goal after developing alternatives based on logical assumptions, facts, available resources, constraints, and organizational values. At least 1 year of experience in leading projects
• Strong working knowledge of SAS products and their applications
• Strong knowledge of production-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems, including document ingestion, parsing, chunking, metadata management, embeddings, vector indexing, retrieval, reranking, grounding, evaluation, and observability.
• Experience in GenAI and its applications to real-world industry.
• Strong understanding of product security

You are welcome here.

At SAS, it’s not about fitting into our culture - it’s about adding to it. We believe our people make the difference. Our inclusive workforce brings together unique talents and inspires teams to create amazing software that reflects the diversity of our users and customers.

Additional Information:

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