Lead and grow a Colombia-based AI engineering team (3-5 engineers), own delivery across multiple client engagements, set technical architecture and standards, stay hands-on for high-stakes builds (agents, multi-step pipelines, integrations), partner on engineering strategy, and represent the team with clients and internal stakeholders to ensure quality, timely delivery, and scalable production AI systems.
Director of AIEngineering
About Cadre AI
The Role
What You'll Do
Engineering Leadership and Team Development
What You Need to Succeed
Why Cadre AI
Compensation
Colombia · Remote · Full-Time
Cadre AI is an AI strategy and integration firm that builds production AI systems for B2B companies in private equity, wholesale lending, real estate, and SaaS. We do not build decks about what AI could do. We ship systems that move revenue, compress costs, and automate the work that used to take entire teams.
As Director of AI Engineering, you sit at the intersection of technical depth and engineering leadership. You are a skilled builder who still gets hands-on with the hardest problems, and a people leader who owns the growth, delivery, and quality of a team of 3 to 5 engineers. You report to the Head of AI Engineering and serve as their closest thought partner on technical direction, team structure, and how Cadre's engineering capability evolves.
You make sure the whole team executes well and that the work stays connected to client outcomes and strategic priorities. You own delivery across multiple engagements simultaneously, catch problems before they become fires, and bring the judgment to know when to push forward and when to escalate. You communicate as fluently with clients and strategists as you do with engineers.
You thrive here if you are energized by growing people, shaping technical strategy, and still want to be close enough to the code to know when something is wrong.
- Manage and develop a team of 3 to 5 Colombia-based engineers, owning their growth, performance, and retention.
- Set the quality bar for the team through code review standards, architecture patterns, and delivery practices that Staff and mid-level engineers build on.
- Run structured 1:1s, provide direct feedback, and build growth plans that make your engineers promotable, not just productive.
- Partner with the Head of AI Engineering on team hiring, capacity planning, and how the Colombia team scales over time.
- Own end-to-end delivery across multiple client engagements simultaneously: timelines, quality, dependencies, and risk.
- Identify delivery risks early and resolve or escalate before they reach the client or the Head; protect the team from scope creep without losing client trust.
- Maintain clear visibility into what every engineer on your team is building, why it matters, and where it stands relative to client commitments.
- Ensure handoffs between engineers, engagements, and phases are clean, documented, and do not create rework.
- Stay hands-on with the most complex or highest-stakes builds in the portfolio: agentic systems, multi-step pipelines, integrations with core client infrastructure.
- Drive architecture decisions for your team's engagements, with awareness of how those decisions affect maintainability, cost, and the client's ability to operate the system after delivery.
- Contribute to Cadre's internal technical standards: what goes into the production toolkit, how we evaluate new models and frameworks, and what patterns we build on across engagements.
- Serve as a primary thought partner on engineering strategy: team structure, technical direction, tooling investments, and capability gaps.
- Represent the engineering team's perspective in planning conversations, flagging what is technically feasible, what requires more resourcing, and what trade-offs the business is making.
- Own internal initiative: documentation standards, internal tooling, cross-engagement learning, and engineering process improvements.
- Join client calls and strategy sessions where engineering context is required, walking stakeholders through system designs, trade-offs, and build sequencing.
- Translate ambiguous client requirements into concrete delivery plans your team can execute against, and flag scope or feasibility issues before they become commitments.
- Build client confidence in Cadre's technical execution through clear communication, reliable delivery, and proactive risk management.
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years building LLM-powered systems (RAG, agents, structured extraction, evaluation) in production environments at a consulting firm, agency, or client-services organization.
- Proven people management experience: you have directly managed engineers, given hard feedback, run performance conversations, and made your team measurably better as a result. You want direct reports as a core part of your role, not an add-on.
- A track record of owning delivery across multiple concurrent client engagements: you know how to manage timelines, protect quality under pressure, and keep stakeholders informed without losing the team's trust.
- Expert-level Python, NodeJS and deep full-stack fundamentals, with sound judgment on when to reach for new technology and when boring and reliable wins.
- Production cloud experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure): deploying, monitoring, and maintaining systems that clients operate daily, not just launching them.
- Deep working knowledge of the modern AI stack: prompt and context engineering, evaluation, embeddings, vector search, agent orchestration frameworks, and LLM API integration.
- The communication range to move between a code review, a 1:1 with an engineer, a client architecture walkthrough, and a strategic planning sessions without losing precision or credibility in any of them.
- Consulting-environment adaptability: comfort switching between client contexts, industries, and codebases, and the ability to hold context across multiple engagements without losing detail.
- Based in Colombia with reliable overlap with US business hours for client and team collaboration.
- An AI-first working style: you use these tools daily to multiply your output, and you build that expectation into your team.
- Real scope. You own your engineering team in Colombia, with direct influence over how the team is built, how it works, and where it goes. This is not a coordination role.
- AI-native culture. We do not just build AI for clients. We use it to run our own operations. You will work with people who are as obsessed with the tools as you are.
- Access to the frontier. Through partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI, you will be among the first to experiment with new models and capabilities.
- Upside. We are bootstrapped, profitable, and growing fast. Early team members share in the success they help create.
- No bureaucracy. Clear accountability. The best idea wins, regardless of who says it.
If you want to lead engineers who ship systems that actually change how businesses operate, and help set the technical direction for a firm that is growing fast and building the real thing, this is that role.
Apply at cadreai.com/careers
CADRE AI
The base pay range for this role is $7,000 – $8,000 per month.
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