AI Engineering Manager - Player-Coach

AI Engineering Manager (Player-Coach) Location: Manyata Tech Park, Bangalore

Company: Black Box

Company Overview Black Box is a global leader in digital infrastructure solutions, delivering network and system integration, managed services, and technology products to enterprises worldwide. As part of our strategic transformation, Black Box is expanding its AI Center of Excellence (CoE) to deliver enterprise-grade AI solutions across multiple business domains.

The AI CoE focuses on building scalable, secure, and production-ready AI systems, establishing best practices for enterprise AI adoption, and integrating AI capabilities into core business platforms.

Role Summary As an Engineering Manager (Player-Coach) in the AI Center of Excellence (CoE), you will lead and grow a team of AI engineers responsible for delivering production-grade AI solutions across key enterprise platforms. This role owns people leadership and engineering execution, enabling scalable delivery as our AI portfolio grows.

This is not a “manager-only” role. Successful candidates have the technical depth to review code, guide architecture decisions, and support debugging/incident response when needed—while ensuring the engineering team remains the primary execution engine.

What You Will Do People Leadership & Team Growth

• Build and operate a repeatable hiring pipeline: role definitions, interview loops, candidate evaluation, and hiring decisions aligned to AI CoE priorities.
• Implement structured onboarding: access readiness, environment setup, architecture standards, and first-deliverable ramp plans.
• Coach engineers through 1: 1s, feedback cycles, goal setting (OKRs), and career development plans.
• Develop strong technical ownership within squads by mentoring tech leads and driving accountability.
• Manage interns/contractors and ensure quality standards and expectations are consistently applied.

Execution Management & Delivery Discipline

• Translate portfolio priorities into clear squad execution plans with ownership, sequencing, and sustainable workload distribution.
• Partner with Agile Delivery and Product roles to ensure requirements are clear, teams are planned against realistic capacity, and delivery remains predictable.
• Drive consistent execution behaviors: reduced thrash, clear ownership of technical debt, and strong follow-through.

Hands-on Technical Leadership (Player-Coach)

• Participate in technical design reviews to ensure solutions are scalable, maintainable, and aligned to enterprise constraints (security, reliability, integrations).
• Review code and validate implementation approaches; coach engineers on best practices and quality improvements.
• Support critical debugging, incident response, and root cause analysis; drive corrective and preventive actions.
• Contribute hands-on through spikes/prototyping or targeted coding when required to unblock delivery (without becoming the primary IC).

Engineering Quality, SDLC & Operational Readiness

• Establish and enforce engineering standards: code review discipline, branching strategy, testing practices, and release readiness checklists.
• Improve production readiness: monitoring expectations, incident runbooks, post-release stabilization practices.
• Promote reuse and maintainability through shared libraries, reference architectures, and consistent implementation patterns.

Developer Productivity & Tooling (DevEx)

• Improve developer productivity and delivery quality through standardization and automation across Azure DevOps (Repos/Boards/Pipelines).
• Define and enforce PR policies, CI/CD quality gates, reusable repo/pipeline templates, and environment setup automation.
• Drive measurable improvements in throughput and reliability using agreed metrics (e.g., lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, mean time to recovery).

Required Qualifications- 8+ years in software engineering, including 2+ years in engineering management with people management responsibilities.

• Strong technical foundation with the ability to review code, debug issues, and guide architecture decisions (hands-on leadership).
• Proven experience leading teams delivering production software (APIs/services, integrations, and/or UI).
• Demonstrated ability to hire, onboard, coach, and grow engineering talent.
• Strong execution discipline: can translate priorities into delivery without micromanagement.
• Strong engineering quality mindset: code reviews, testing, CI/CD gates, and operational readiness.

Preferred Qualifications- Experience with AI/LLM product engineering (RAG, evaluation, orchestration, agent/tool calling).

• Experience integrating solutions with enterprise platforms such as ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce, M365/SharePoint, and Azure services.
• Familiarity with security/compliance expectations (RBAC, private networking, approvals workflows).
• Experience driving DevEx initiatives: tooling, automation, CI/CD standardization, and engineering productivity metrics.
• Experience managing distributed teams and mixed staffing models (full-time + contractors/vendors).
• Certifications are a plus (people leadership, Agile, cloud, AI).

About Black Box Black Box is a leading technology solutions provider focused on accelerating customer success through innovation, ownership, transparency, and collaboration. With over 2,500 team members across 24 countries, Black Box delivers high-value solutions globally by designing, integrating, and managing complex technology environments for enterprises.

Black Box is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate based on race, color, gender, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected status.