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Thrivent · 2 months ago

AI Engineering Manager

United States

Full-time

Remote

Senior Level, Lead/Staff

$137K/yr - $185K/yr

8+ years exp

Thrivent is seeking an experienced AI Engineering Manager to lead a high-performing team building scalable, secure, and compliant production AI systems. The role involves combining deep technical leadership with strategic oversight to drive AI initiatives from ideation through production and operations across AWS and Azure.

FinanceFinancial ExchangesFinancial ServicesInsurance

H1B Sponsor Likely

Responsibilities

Leading and mentoring a team to deliver solutions spanning model development, agentic system design, and AI integration—ensuring observability, security, performance, and cost efficiency

Providing expertise in AI governance & Responsible AI aligned to financial-services expectations (e.g., NIST AI RMF, model risk management, GLBA privacy)

Establishing operating policies, engineering standards, and SDLC/ML lifecycle practices that scale across teams

Translating company-wide objectives into budgets, roadmaps, OKRs, and measurable outcomes

Partnering with senior business and technology stakeholders to shape strategy, unblock delivery, and ensure compliance

Leading briefings and technical reviews that support IT objectives and executive decision-making

Guide end-to-end architecture for AI systems (data features models serving monitoring), spanning AWS & Azure; review ADRs and ensure threat modeling, data lineage, and cost/perf trade-offs are explicit

Land decisions on RAG patterns, agent orchestration, vector indexing, prompt management, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop controls for regulated use cases

Sponsor reference architectures (Bedrock vs. SageMaker vs. EKS; Azure OpenAI vs. Azure ML vs. K8) and promote reuse via templates and golden paths

Maintain hands-on credibility: read code, give architectural/code reviews, and insist on testing, type safety, CI/CD, IaC, and SRE hygiene (SLOs/error budgets)

Uphold secure coding and data protection (PII handling, tokenization, KMS/Key Vault, private networking)

Create space for tech spikes, brown-bags, and internal demos; track advances in LLM inference (vLLM/TGI/ONNX/TensorRT), guardrails, evals, and privacy-preserving ML

Anticipate trends (context-window management, retrieval quality, tool-use/agents, model distillation/quantization) and adapt roadmaps

Strengthen agile practices (scrum/kanban), partner with Product on outcomes & metrics, and remove systemic blockers

Broker cross-product solutions (common feature store, prompt/eval service, model registry, shared vector search)

Align the team to company priorities and risk posture; ensure auditability and runbooks

Co-create vision, strategy, and roadmaps for AI platform & products; influence backlog with business value cases and risk/cost transparency

Empower the team to choose fit-for-purpose tools within guardrails; rationalize where to buy vs. build

Codify ML/LLM golden paths (templates for RAG, batch/online inference, streaming features)

Champion observability-by-default (tracing, prompt logs, retrieval quality metrics, safety incident workflow)

Contribute to enterprise frameworks (data contracts, model governance, rollout patterns)

Own the ML/LLM lifecycle: data quality experiment tracking model registry gated promotions canary/shadow monitoring & drift response

Serve as escalation for production incidents; drive post-mortems, defect SLAs, and continuous improvement

Continuously evaluate latency, reliability, accuracy, safety, and cost

Define selection criteria; lead RFPs/POCs; manage vendor performance, SOWs

Be an advocate to the team to define criteria’s for selecting the right platform/technology

Guide the team to build consensus on an approach and driving a build vs buy decision with the team. In a buy decision, works with the team to decide on criteria and vendor selection

Execute or manage the overall technology solutions, platforms for the product groups and associated vendor relationships

Holding regular 1:1s with team members and team meeting

Provides constructive feedback, guidance and coaching to help engineers grow their skills and experience

Provides career planning advice to engineers and creates development plans to help them achieve their career goals which leverages their skills and capabilities and provides them with learning opportunities

Leads the process of selecting and engaging the right consulting partners

Planning in advance for future people needs for the product groups, collaborate with the other teams on the recruitment process

Recruits, develops, and sustains a high-performing team while promoting a culture of shared accountability, operational excellence, and partnership across the organization

Models Thrivent’s leadership competencies – courage, collaboration, and commitment by demonstrating resiliency, working together to make the best decisions, and holding yourself and others accountable

Supports and/or develops an environment in which Thrivent employees and colleagues are focused on continuous improvement, exceptional employee engagement, and an unwavering commitment to our clients

Shapes and/or supports a culture that represents the Thrivent purpose, promise and values, ensuring that Thrivent’s trust and reputation remain strong with its clients

Manage a team of direct and indirect staff

Qualification

AI governanceAWSAzureML lifecycle managementFinancial Services experienceProject managementLeadershipTeam collaborationCommunication skillsProblem-solving

Required

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or other technical field or equivalent work experience

8+ years of progressively responsible positions in Information Technology including 5+ years' experience in IT discipline, e.g., customer relationship management, portfolio strategy and roadmap development

3+ years of leadership experience in all aspects of a specific IT discipline, e.g. IT/LOB customer relationship management, portfolio strategy and/or demand management

3+ years' management/supervisory experience in specific IT functional area discipline, e.g. applications development or equivalent skills leading major technical projects with accountability for enforcing talent management needs and performance standards

Demonstrated leadership and experience managing multidiscipline, high-performance work teams

Strong competency in project management and execution of multiple or large projects

Experience working with customers to develop solutions to complex business problems

Proven ability to communicate effectively with internal/external stakeholders to support business initiatives

Proven ability to function in an environment which requires flexibility, good judgment and intelligent decision making, often based on limited information and/or extreme conditions

Ability to formulate, implement and evaluate plans, programs and procedures applicable to customer relationship and demand management

Preferred

Financial Services industry experience

Experience in IT planning and business relationship management

Experience working in a matrix management organization

Experience with product development and management

Benefits

Various bonuses (including, for example, annual or long-term incentives)

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Health savings account

Flexible spending account

401k

Pension

Life and accidental death and dismemberment insurance

Disability insurance

Supplemental protection insurance

20 days of Paid Time Off each year

Sick and Safe Time

10 paid company holidays

Volunteer Time Off

Paid parental leave

EAP

Well-being benefits

Other employee benefits

Company

Thrivent

Glassdoor3.7

Thrivent is a financial services organization that helps Christians be wise with money and live generously.

Founded in 1902

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

5001-10000 employees

https://www.thrivent.com

H1B Sponsorship

Thrivent has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)

Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship

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Trends of Total Sponsorships

2025 (10)

2024 (9)

2023 (15)

2022 (6)

2021 (2)

2020 (2)