Engineering Manager: Applied AI

What you'll do:

• Build and lead the team. You will lead and grow a squad of senior full-stack engineers building AI-enabled tooling managing the full lifecycle of hiring onboarding and continuous growth through weekly 1:1s and performance feedback. You’ll align individual aspirations with business needs while fostering a culture of high standards and psychological safety.

• Set the charter and direction. Partnering with Engineering leadership Product and Design you will define the team’s ownership boundaries and shape Copia’s applied-AI strategy — translating high-level goals into a clear roadmap and well-scoped delivery milestones and using product taste to decide where GenAI genuinely improves the experience for our users.

• Ship AI features that matter to customers. You will guide the team to integrate GenAI into Copia’s existing Source Control and DeviceLink products and to improve the experience of the Copia Copilot — shipping high-quality scalable well-documented capabilities and measuring their adoption and impact.

• Drive the technical direction. You will oversee the architecture of AI-powered full-stack systems — frontend experiences backend services APIs and the AI plumbing behind them (LLM integration RAG pipelines evaluation model selection prompt and context strategies) — and ensure they are reliable and scale. You’ll stay close enough to the technology to provide architectural input code reviews and hands-on contributions where they add the most leverage.

• Champion how we build with AI. You’ll help the team make AI coding agents a central part of how they work to increase velocity while maintaining high standards and you’ll share best practices that raise how the entire engineering organization leverages AI tools.

• Own operational quality and how we work. You’ll be responsible for on-call practices incident response runbooks and the engineering standards (from CI/CD to ADRs testing and evaluation of AI behavior) that empower the team to move faster with higher confidence in a safety-critical domain.

What we're looking for:

• 5+ years of professional full-stack software engineering experience with at least 1–2 years of formal or informal people-leadership experience (tech lead team lead or direct management).

• Hands-on experience building AI-enabled products — not just using ChatGPT but shipping applications backed by LLM APIs RAG and related GenAI techniques — and the judgment to tell where AI adds durable value versus where it doesn’t.

• A strong technical foundation across the stack — frontend backend APIs and data — and the ability to design AI-powered capabilities that are reliable scalable and maintainable.

• Daily fluency with AI coding tools (e.g. Cursor Claude Code or Copilot) and a clear sense of their strengths and weaknesses plus a track record of helping others get more out of them.

• Demonstrated ability to coach engineers — helping them grow technically take on bigger scope and develop in their careers.

• Strong written and verbal communication. You can adjust your message for engineers executives and partner teams without losing the substance and you can explain complex AI work to non-technical stakeholders.

• Sound judgment around prioritization scope and trade-offs including knowing when to ship a focused MVP versus investing in the right foundation and when to say “no” or “not yet.”

• Eagerness to dig into a complex domain. You don’t need to know PLCs on day one but you should be excited to learn how factories actually run.

• Empathy humility and high standards. You are kind to people and tough on problems.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science Engineering or equivalent practical experience.

Bonus points:

• Experience shipping production GenAI features at scale — evaluation frameworks prompt and context engineering retrieval pipelines model selection or guardrails for safety-critical use.

• Deeper ML background: model training or fine-tuning (e.g. a strong Kaggle result or a popular open-source fine-tune) not just consuming AI tooling.

• Experience starting or growing a team — defining charter hiring engineers and establishing how it works with the rest of the org.

• Experience standing up or improving engineering practices: incident response on-call ADRs code review standards or career ladders.

• Experience with some of our stack or adjacent technologies on both sides of the wire: TypeScript / Node.js React Go C# Python PostgreSQL AWS Datadog.

• Experience building developer tools or working on Git internals CI/CD or DevOps platforms.

• Background in B2B SaaS developer tools industrial automation OT/IT manufacturing software or IoT.

What We Do

Copia is redefining how the world’s factories energy systems and infrastructure are built and maintained. Our Industrial Code Lifecycle Management Platform connects software engineering practices with operational technology giving manufacturers resiliency with the visibility control and confidence they need to innovate safely.We’re engineers builders and problem-solvers driven by one mission:Keep industry moving forward.Copia is building the modern engineering platform for industrial automation. Industrial organizations operate critical infrastructure on PLCs SCADA and OT networks. These environments power manufacturing energy food production and infrastructure worldwide. Most of them still rely on fragmented tooling and manual workflows that would not be tolerated in any modern software environment.Copia closes that gap. We bring the discipline of modern software engineering to operational technology teams giving controls engineers and IT security teams the version control change management and operational resilience their environments demand.Two concepts define what we do:Industrial Code Lifecycle Management (ICLM) applies structured lifecycle practices to automation code and configuration management. Think DevOps for the plant floor. It enables industrial teams to manage PLC logic configurations and automation assets with version control traceability and controlled deployment processes. No more tribal knowledge. No more manual backups on USB drives. No more mystery around what changed when and who made the call.Operational Technology Disaster Recovery (OTDR) ensures automation systems can be rapidly restored after failures cyber incidents or operational disruptions. It covers backup validation system restoration procedures and resilience planning for industrial control systems. When ransomware hits or equipment fails production gets back online in hours not weeks.Together ICLM and OTDR form the foundation for secure resilient industrial automation environments. Copia is the platform that makes both operationally real.

Why Work With Us

At Copia you’ll work with some of the most advanced industrial and engineering organizations in the world. You’ll help them adopt modern tools that improve how engineering teams collaborate manage code and operate critical infrastructure.Copia is growing incredibly quickly as a company thus all roles are seen as "growth track" roles.