Applied AI Engineer - Manager

The posting, as Percepta wrote it

WHO WE ARE

Percepta’s mission is to transform critical institutions with applied AI. We care that industries that power the world (e.g. healthcare, manufacturing, energy) benefit from frontier technology.

To make that happen, we embed with industry-leading customers to drive AI transformation. We bring together: https://challenge.percepta.ai

• Forward-deployed expertise in engineering, product, and research
• Mosaic, our in-house toolkit for rapidly deploying agentic workflows
• Strategic partnerships with Anthropic, McKinsey, AWS, companies within the General Catalyst portfolio, and more

Our team is a quickly growing group of Applied AI Engineers, Embedded Product Managers and Researchers motivated by diffusing the promise of AI into improvements we can feel in our day to day lives.

Percepta is a direct partnership with General Catalyst, a global transformation and investment company.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're hiring a player-coach Engineering Manager to help us grow our incredible engineers who are tackling our customers’ hardest problems.

Our Applied AI Engineers embed directly with customer teams. They own delivery, sit with operators and executives and ship production AI systems into environments nobody would describe as clean.

You will help scale the growth of our Applied AI engineers by managing a small team (to start) of engineers across one of our customer engagements. Your primary output is their trajectory: What they can own in 6 months that they can't own today.

Everyone at Percepta is a builder, and you'll still be writing code. Expect to be in a codebase most weeks, reviewing designs, pairing on the gnarly parts, and stepping in directly when a launch is at risk. This isn't a coding-optional role. It’s a player-coach role because we strongly believe in staying close to the work. Your engineers are making architecture calls inside unfamiliar enterprise systems under real time pressure. It’s hard to do that from the outside, so you will have to be able to dig into the weeds when needed.

The balance shifts week to week. During a rollout you're closer to the code. Between rollouts you're closer to your people. Both are the job.

You'll partner with an Engagement Lead on customer strategy and with Growth Leads on each engineer's development, so you're not carrying the whole picture alone. You'll also be one of the leading voices on what Mosaic should become, because you'll be deeply embedded with the problems, and be intimately familiar with where the pain points are.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Grow engineers, deliberately. Have a real point of view on where each person is today and where they could be in 6 to 12 months, then aim their work at the overlap between what they're interested in, what they need to build, and what the business actually needs. Stretch assignments should be work that matters, not busywork dressed up as development.

Ramp people properly. Invest heavily up front: Learn about your direct reports, their
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ism, responsibility, and genuine belief that we can make it happen. We have to embrace the hard things when no one else will.

Heart in the game: What we're doing matters and we have to give a shit. Internally, that means fixing badness when you find it. Externally, it means honoring the trust our customers place in us with their most important problems. This isn’t a 9-5, nor is it a job we’re ever going to monitor your hours. We promise to put work in front of you that matters and in return, we ask you to promise to care.

Win for the customer: Everyone is an engineer and the job of an engineer is to deliver outcomes, not outputs. Everything we do—the products we build, the partnerships we launch, the strategy we set—exists to make our customers successful. Delivery is the strategy.

Make the call: Organizations are only as strong as the pace at which they make decisions. Everyone at Percepta should feel empowered to commit and shape the ambiguity in front of them. But "make the call" cuts both ways: make the decision and make the phone call. High-agency decision-making only works with high-bandwidth communication and we commit to never operate in silos.

Intensity with kindness: We believe in excellence in execution, candor in feedback, ruthlessness in prioritization, and survivalist urgency. We also believe you don't need to be an asshole to deliver on any of this. The trust built through shared kindness and vulnerability is what makes the intensity sustainable.

Percepta is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and we evaluate every qualified applicant on their merits and give equal consideration for employment regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, veteran or uniformed service status, age, or any other characteristic protected under applicable law. Percepta provides reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees in accordance with federal and applicable state law.