Sr. Manager, Engineering - AI & Innovation

Job Description: Job Title: Senior Manager, Engineering - AI & Innovation Location: Remote | USA, Canada Reports to: VP, Architecture (Engineering - Enterprise Architecture and AI & Innovation) Employment Type: Full-time This is new vacancy - Internal + External posting About the Role: You own AI & Innovation. You take direct, day-to-day leadership of the Innovation Crew and Launch Lab pods. Where the AI & Innovation Manager owns process and delivery mechanics and the Principal AI Engineer owns technical architecture, you own the people, the roadmap, and the outcomes. You are the true people leader in this function, the Manager and every engineer on the team look to you for direction, growth, and the final call on priority when demand exceeds capacity. In your first 30 days, you will have met with every team member, reviewed the active intake pipeline and PoC backlog, and confirmed the operating cadence. By day 60, you will have delivered your first quarterly roadmap review to the VP and identified the team's next hiring priority. By day 90, you will own the full reporting line for both pods and be the team's primary voice in cross-engineering leadership forums. This role is what lets AI & Innovation operate as a durable, standalone function rather than one leader's personal project. Hiring decisions, roadmap trade-offs, and escalations that once required a single point of judgment now have a dedicated owner, giving the team a stable center of gravity as it scales. The PoC velocity, Power Agents adoption rate, engineering hours saved, and AI Standards compliance the team is measured by are outcomes you own and report on directly to the VP and, in turn, to Engineering leadership. You translate enterprise AI strategy into a roadmap your engineers can execute against, and you translate what your engineers learn in production back into direction the rest of JD Power's engineering organization can trust. In this role, you will: • Hire, manage, coach, and grow the AI & Innovation function; own performance management, career development, and org design decisions as the team scales. • Own the team roadmap: partner with the VP of Architecture to translate enterprise AI strategy into a quarterly roadmap for Innovation Crew (PoC delivery, Power Agents, AI Standards, Emerging Tech Radar) and Launch Lab (application delivery, hand-offs to maintaining teams); make the trade-off calls when demand exceeds capacity. • Own the operating cadence end to end: serve as final approver on the three-gate intake process, the escalation point when compliance or handoff issues stall a pilot, and the person who ensures the AI & Innovation process protects, rather than slows, engineering time. • Own the DevOps & AppSec and Cloud Engineering partnerships: establish and maintain the working relationship with DevOps & AppSec and Cloud Engineering so CI/CD, infrastructure, and application security needs for Innovation Crew and Launch Lab outputs are met without creating a bottleneck. • Own metrics and executive reporting: report PoC velocity, Power Agents adoption rate, engineering hours saved, and AI Standards compliance to the VP of Architecture and Engineering leadership; represent AI & Innovation results at Engineering Town Halls and quarterly business reviews. • Own the AI agent workforce lifecycle: set the standard for onboarding new agents into production, tracking their performance and adoption against Power Agents metrics, maturing agent capabilities as use cases evolve, and offboarding or retiring agents that no longer meet AI Standards or business need. • Own cross-org relationships: serve as the team's primary point of contact for the eight peer engineering clusters, Product, and business unit leaders; maintain the design-partner and consumer engagement model so demand is prioritized rather than triaged ad hoc; ensure OEM Solutions and Geography-based scope boundaries are respected. • Own delivery of major initiatives that intersect with AI & Innovation: AI Everywhere rollout, Agentic AI framework maturity, Snowflake AI/ML integration coordination with Internal Platforms, and the Engineering Metrics (DORA) program as it applies to the team. • Partner with Legal, InfoSec, and Data Governance on Enterprise AI Standards; ensure every initiative the team ships reflects current governance requirements before it reaches a business stakeholder. Required Qualifications: • 8+ years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated track record of directly managing engineers. • Experience standing up, scaling, or leading an AI/ML, platform, or innovation-focused engineering function, ideally one operating with agentic AI, LLM-based systems, or rapid prototype-to-production delivery. • A track record of partnering with VP or executive-level leaders to translate strategy into an executable, resourced roadmap, and of making the prioritization calls when team capacity and stakeholder demand conflict. • Experience owning delivery metrics and KPIs and reporting them credibly to senior leadership on a recurring cadence. Preferred Qualifications: • Direct hands-on experience with agent frameworks, internal agent libraries (Power Agents or equivalent), or MCP/A2A-style integration patterns enough to have a credible technical conversation with a Principal AI Engineer. • Familiarity with enterprise data platforms (Snowflake) and cloud infrastructure (AWS), and with the DevOps/AppSec disciplines the team now partners with in place of a dedicated platform hire. • Existing JD Power relationships across Engineering Leaders, Product, Legal, InfoSec, or business unit leads - institutional knowledge compresses the path to full effectiveness in this role. • Experience leading teams that operate across both 0-to-1 prototyping and applied, production-facing delivery models simultaneously. Compensation and Benefits This position has a starting salary range of $130,000 - $160,000 CAD / $140,000 - $170,000 USD per year. The range represents what we reasonably and in good faith expect to pay for the role at the time of posting. An employee's pay within the range is determined by a number of factors, including relevant skills, education, qualifications, experience, performance, business or organizational needs, and geographic location. Eligible employees may participate in medical, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, retirement savings programs, paid time off, wellness programs, and other company-sponsored benefits. Benefits vary by country and employment status.