Job description
Engineering Manager – Data & AI (all genders)
Company Overview
KI performance GmbH • Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany (Hybrid)
Job Summary
As an Engineering Manager – Data & AI, you are the system and outcome owner for complex, data-driven and agentic solutions. You hold end-to-end responsibility for technical conception, architectural decisions, implementation depth, and the real, measurable business impact delivered to our clients. This role is deliberately forward-deployed: close to the business problem, close to stakeholders, and close to the engineering work. You combine senior engineering judgment with clear technical decision authority, people leadership, and accountability for delivery outcomes. You are not a pure people manager nor a detached architect. You are a hands-on technical leader who ensures that systems are coherent, production-ready, and valuable in real-world enterprise environments.
Key Responsibilities
- System & Architecture Ownership: Design, evolve, and take ownership of complex Data & AI systems, including agentic architectures, orchestration patterns, integrations, and governance mechanisms. Define architectural guardrails, technical standards, and system-level trade-offs across scalability, cost, reliability, and maintainability. Identify and manage failure modes, fallback strategies, safety boundaries, and human-in-the-loop concepts for production-grade AI systems. Ensure that individual technical contributions come together into a coherent, consistent, and operable end-to-end system.
- End-to-End Outcome Accountability: Own the technical feasibility, implementation quality, and achieved business impact of delivered solutions. Make and defend sound engineering and architecture decisions under technological, domain, and organizational uncertainty. Ensure that responsibility does not stop at design or deployment, but extends to stable operation and sustained customer value.
- Engineering-Driven Delivery & Hands-On Contribution: Actively contribute to system design, agent design, protocols, and integrations — this is not a pure steering or review role. Co-own and prioritize the engineering backlog, translating business goals into clear technical user stories together with Senior Engineers. Sequence and steer implementation based on system dependencies, risk, and outcome impact. Spend a significant portion of time embedded in projects, balancing leadership with hands-on technical involvement.
- People Leadership & Team Development: Lead, mentor, and develop a team of senior engineers, domain engineers, and data experts. Foster a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and system thinking. Partner with People Experience to shape career paths, mentoring, performance development, and capability growth. Recruit, retain, and grow top-tier engineering talent in Data, Cloud, and AI domains. Act as a role model for technical responsibility, clarity in decision-making, and outcome focus.
- Standards, Reuse & Productization: Ensure the use and continuous improvement of existing frameworks, templates, and architectural standards. Identify and drive reusable system, agent, and architecture patterns beyond individual projects. Contribute to the long-term productization and scalability of KI performance’s Data & AI offerings.
- Go-Live Readiness, Stability & Operations Alignment: Own go-live readiness, stabilization phases, and the technical transition into sustainable operations. Work closely with Cloud AI Architects and QA Engineers to align on reliability, security, cost control, monitoring, and quality gates. Decide when systems are production-ready based on business-critical quality criteria.
- Business Development & Client Ownership: Act as technical owner and trusted partner for key customer accounts and strategic engagements. Support pre-sales and business development by shaping technical solution concepts, architectures, and delivery approaches. Contribute to effort estimation, feasibility assessments, and technical risk evaluation in proposals. Build and maintain long-term client relationships, managing expectations and ensuring sustainable value delivery. Represent KI performance as a credible technical authority in customer workshops, decision forums, and executive discussions.
Requirements / Qualifications
- Experience & Mindset: A very senior engineering profile with a strong focus on system thinking, architecture, and ownership, not isolated feature development. Deep experience in Data, Cloud, and/or AI systems, ideally in complex, production-grade enterprise environments. A clear outcome-oriented mindset: responsibility ends with stable customer value, not with deployment.
- Technical Expertise: Strong background in cloud-native data and AI architectures, ideally with platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Databricks. Proven ability to design end-to-end systems, including data pipelines, agent orchestration, integrations, monitoring, and governance. High confidence in making and communicating technical trade-offs across performance, cost, risk, and maintainability.
- Leadership & Communication: Demonstrated ability to lead senior engineers, earn trust, and drive alignment without micromanagement. Excellent communication and facilitation skills in technical, cross-functional, and customer-facing settings. Comfortable representing and defending technical decisions towards engineering teams, product leaders, management, and clients.
Language & Mobility
- Fluent in English and German, written and spoken.
- Willingness to travel (up to 30%) to work closely with customers and stakeholders.
Why Join KI performance?
- Shape and own real-world, production-grade Data & AI systems with tangible business impact.
- Work in a role with true technical decision authority and end-to-end responsibility.
- Combine deep engineering work, people leadership, and business development in one senior role.
- Be part of a culture that values ownership, clarity, and technical excellence over hype.
- Actively influence how KI performance positions itself as a leader in the Data & AI ecosystem.
Equal Opportunity Statement
Different perspectives make better teams. We welcome applications from everyone, regardless of gender identity, ethnic or social background, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation. What matters to us is what you bring to the team and what you want to build with us.
