Senior engineer manger - AI
Senior Engineering Manager (Chapter Lead) - AI Products Freelance engagement · Ghent, Belgium Location: Ghent, Belgium (three office days per week; visits to any of the group's offices count as office days). Regular time in the Netherlands. Engagement: Freelance, long-term Reports to: Head of Product & AI Rate: Competitive - to be discussed About the client Our client is an accountancy and advisory group operating across multiple countries in Western Europe, with several thousand colleagues. Firms that join the group keep their own name, their people and their client relationships. What the group adds is scale: shared platforms, shared data and shared AI products. The role The group builds AI products for accounting work - agents that prepare and review the work, and the surfaces accountants and their clients use them in. The products are built in squads, each run by a Product Manager. You build the engineering team and are the line manager of every engineer in those squads. Internally the role is called Chapter Lead Engineering. Most of today's engineering is done by specialist partners. You lead the transition to an internal team, squad by squad, and decide when each one is ready. You start with the first hires and build a chapter of ten to fifteen engineers across Belgium and the Netherlands by the end of 2027. You are the engineers' hierarchical manager: hiring, development and performance. You do not lead their day-to-day work. That happens inside the squad, where the Product Manager sets the priorities, because nobody can run the daily work of nine squads. Architecture is owned by the AI Architect; how the team engineers, reviews, tests and ships is yours. You are not a member of a squad and you carry no squad's delivery commitments, but you stay close to the code. This is a new position in a department that is still being built, so part of the way of working is yours to define. What you'll own The team. Recruitment, onboarding, staffing across the squads, and keeping the people you hired. The engineering career ladder and how the group hires against it, agreed with HR. The craft. Engineering standards, code review, testing and release practice, how agents are evaluated before they ship (with the analysts), how engineers use AI coding tools, and the quality of what ships. The dev stack. Code hosting and CI/CD, environments, developer tooling, licences and access. Everyone who builds at the group uses the same set, and you decide what is in it. How production is run. The on-call model, incident practice and run-and-maintain staffing for agents in production. The Product Manager decides what risk a product carries. You decide how the team responds when something breaks. The insourcing transitions. Which squad moves from partner to internal engineering next, what has to be true before it does, and the handover itself. The engineering organisation is yours: who gets hired, how the team builds, and when a squad is ready to run without a partner. What you need One thing matters more than the rest: you have led engineers who shipped AI products to production, and you stayed responsible for what happened after launch. Eight or more years in software engineering, three or more of them managing engineers Conversational Dutch or French, and fluent English A plus: You have built an engineering team from the first hires to ten or more You have led a transition from partner-built to in-house engineering This role suits you if You have hired engineers yourself and lived with the result You can read a pull request and tell whether the team is in trouble You would rather build a team than run one you inherited You can hold a standard across squads that all want an exception A function that is still taking shape appeals to you Confidential - client name available on discussion. For more information contact Kashif Mahmood, GCS · 07704 086 433 · [email protected]
GCS is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.
Senior engineer manger - AI
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