AI Head of Engineering

Smart Capital Center is an AI-powered platform transforming Commercial Real Estate (CRE) investment and financial management. Our platform combines real-time market data, financial modeling, workflow automation, and Generative AI to power underwriting, asset management, and portfolio analytics.

Operating at the intersection of AI, finance, and commercial real estate, we are building software that replaces manual, spreadsheet-driven workflows with intelligent, scalable systems.

Our clients include leading institutions such as JLL, Pacific Life Insurance Company, and KeyBank. We are a lean, high-performance engineering organization solving complex problems in a $17 trillion industry.

Learn more at www.smartcapitalcenter.com

The Role
We are looking for an Engineering Manager who combines strong technical leadership with exceptional people management and execution.

This is a hands-on leadership role. While your primary responsibility is building and leading a high-performing engineering team, you will remain deeply involved in technical direction, architecture, AI adoption, and engineering excellence.

You will partner closely with Product, Design, Data, AI, and executive leadership to translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions while fostering an engineering culture centered on ownership, innovation, continuous improvement, and rapid execution.

As an engineering leader, you will help shape not only what we build, but how we build it—leveraging AI to improve both our products and our engineering processes.

What You'll Do
Engineering Leadership
Lead, mentor, and grow a team of high-performing software engineers.
Build a culture of ownership, accountability, technical excellence, and continuous learning.
Recruit, hire, and retain exceptional engineering talent.
Coach engineers through regular one-on-ones, performance feedback, and career development.
Foster psychological safety while maintaining high performance standards.
Develop future technical leaders within the organization.

Technical Leadership
Drive technical direction alongside senior engineers and architects.
Review system architecture and technical designs.
Guide architectural decisions that improve scalability, reliability, maintainability, and security.
Balance long-term platform evolution with near-term product delivery.
Establish engineering standards, coding practices, testing strategies, and documentation expectations.
Drive continuous improvement across engineering processes and developer experience.

AI Engineering Leadership
Partner with AI engineers to build and operate AI-powered product capabilities.
Establish best practices for integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into production systems.
Promote responsible AI engineering, including evaluation, monitoring, security, and governance.
Drive adoption of AI-assisted software development tools to improve engineering productivity.
Evaluate emerging AI technologies and recommend practical adoption where they create measurable business value.
Help engineers effectively leverage modern AI development tools including GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, and similar platforms.

Delivery & Execution
Own engineering execution across multiple initiatives and product domains.
Partner with Product Managers to define roadmaps, priorities, estimates, and delivery plans.
Remove blockers and enable teams to execute efficiently.
Drive predictable software delivery without compromising engineering quality.
Continuously improve planning, estimation, release management, and Agile execution.
Ensure successful delivery of customer-facing features and internal platform improvements.

Platform & Operational Excellence
Drive improvements in platform reliability, scalability, observability, and operational excellence.
Improve CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment processes, and developer productivity.
Establish engineering metrics including deployment frequency, lead time, reliability, defect rates, and operational health.
Promote ownership of production systems and operational excellence.
Support incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement initiatives.

Cross-Functional Collaboration
Partner closely with Product, UX, AI, Data, and Customer Success teams.
Communicate technical strategy and project status to stakeholders.
Align engineering priorities with company objectives.
Participate actively in product planning and strategic decision making.

Requirements
Leadership
Significant experience building and delivering production software.
Experience leading software engineering teams in fast-moving environments.
Proven success hiring, mentoring, and developing engineers.
Strong coaching, communication, and organizational skills.
Demonstrated ability to build high-performing engineering teams.
Ability to influence across technical and business organizations.

Technical Background
Strong experience building and shipping modern full-stack applications.
Expertise with modern frontend technologies including React, TypeScript, and JavaScript.
Strong backend experience using Java/Spring Boot and/or Python.
Experience designing scalable APIs and distributed systems.
Strong understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred).
Experience building cloud-native applications on AWS or similar cloud platforms.
Solid understanding of software architecture, security, scalability, and system reliability.

AI & Modern Engineering
Experience building, integrating, or operating AI-powered applications.
Understanding of LLMs, prompt engineering, structured outputs, tool/function calling, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, or AI orchestration frameworks is a plus.
Experience using AI-assisted software development tools to improve engineering productivity.
Ability to evaluate emerging AI technologies and drive practical adoption across engineering teams.
Understanding of AI security, governance, and responsible AI practices.

Engineering Management
Experience leading Agile software development.
Strong understanding of modern software delivery practices.
Experience balancing engineering quality with delivery speed.
Ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment.
Data-driven approach to planning, execution, and continuous improvement.
Experience defining and tracking engineering performance metrics.

Core Competencies
Technical leadership
Strategic thinking
Ownership mindset
Strong execution
Excellent communication
Coaching and mentoring
Systems thinking
Pragmatic decision making
Continuous improvement
Customer-focused problem solving

Nice to Have
Commercial Real Estate (CRE), financial systems, or analytics platform experience.
Experience with event-driven or microservice architectures.
Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, or Infrastructure as Code.
Experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry.
Experience with high-volume data processing and distributed systems.
Experience scaling engineering teams in startup or high-growth environments.

Why Join Smart Capital Center
Lead engineering for an AI-native platform transforming Commercial Real Estate.
Shape engineering culture, architecture, and technical strategy.
Build products used by leading financial institutions.
Work directly with founders and executive leadership.
Solve complex challenges across AI, financial modeling, and large-scale data.
Build an engineering organization where AI accelerates both product innovation and developer productivity.
Operate with high ownership, rapid decision-making, and minimal bureaucracy.