Engineering Manager, Applied AI & Data Science
Player-coach Engineering Manager leading The Economist Group's Applied AI & Data Science team — managing AI/ML, NLP engineers and data scientists while staying hands-on building production generative, agentic AI, RAG and ML systems on AWS for internal and customer-facing products.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- London - Commercial
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Lead
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Data science
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Track record as engineering manager or tech lead with direct people management of AI/ML, NLP engineers and/or data scientists
- Experience balancing hands-on technical contribution with people leadership and delivery ownership
- Strong hands-on AI/ML engineering background with extensive Python experience and code review across LLM, agentic, NLP and classical ML systems
- Hands-on experience with modern agent frameworks (Strands Agents, LangGraph, Claude Agent SDK) and interoperability standards such as MCP and A2A
- Cloud-native expertise on AWS: Amazon Bedrock and Bedrock AgentCore, SageMaker, Lambda, Step Functions, CDK or equivalent IaC
- LLMOps/MLOps experience: agent and trajectory evaluation, tracing (e.g. OpenTelemetry), guardrails, cost monitoring, automated model pipelines
- Understanding of agent security risks (prompt injection, data leakage, over-permissioned tools) and mitigations
- Day-to-day use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) across planning, coding, testing and review
- Able to set team standards for AI-assisted development, including context engineering and review of AI-generated code
- Solid grounding in applied data science to lead and constructively challenge data scientists
- Excellent communication skills with technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Strong product sense: interrogating and refining requirements rather than taking them as given
Nice to have
- Experience applying AI in media, publishing, entertainment or other content-led industries
- Experience building and operating agentic AI in production, including multi-agent orchestration, MCP tool use, agent memory and agentic RAG
- Depth in NLP: information extraction, classification, summarisation, semantic search, or LLM fine-tuning
- Experience building shared AI platforms or reusable capabilities consumed by multiple product teams
- Vector search at scale (OpenSearch, Amazon S3 Vectors, pgvector)
- Familiarity with AI governance/regulation and responsible AI practices
- Advanced degree in computer science, data science, linguistics or related quantitative field, or equivalent experience
Full description
Who we are
Since 1843, The Economist Group has championed independence, excellence and openness, helping people understand and tackle the critical challenges shaping the world. Today, we are building on that legacy as a global media and information-services company powered by digital innovation, analytical rigour and evidence-based insight.
Across our three businesses -The Economist, Economist Enterprise and Economist Education - we deliver trusted analysis and insights to individuals and organisations in more than 170 countries. United by a shared purpose to drive progress, we empower decision-makers to make sense of change and chart a course through an increasingly complex world.
As a colleague, you will be part of a culture that values ideas, encourages ownership and holds itself to high standards. We invest in people who are curious, thoughtful and adaptable, whether they are launching new products, reporting on global events or harnessing emerging technologies such as AI to improve how we work. Here, fresh thinking is taken seriously, ambition is matched by integrity, and great work is recognised. Working across disciplines, geographies and perspectives, we are united by a commitment to innovation, excellence and creating meaningful impact.
Want to discover more about life at The Economist Group? Follow @EconomistCareers on Instagram to discover the people, stories and opportunities that make TEG unique.
Technology, Product & Data
Our team of 450 colleagues across Technology, Product and Data is at the heart of The Economist Group’s digital-first agenda. Together, we design, build and optimise the digital products, platforms and data capabilities that power our business and reach millions of people around the world. Whether you're an engineer, product manager, designer, data scientist or analyst, you'll work on products that have real-world impact. From enhancing economist.com and developing new products for Economist Intelligence to creating personalised experiences and applying AI to solve complex challenges, you'll help shape how consumers, businesses and government leaders access trusted insights. Working in cross-functional teams, we combine engineering excellence, product thinking and data expertise to solve meaningful problems, experiment with new technologies and continuously improve the experiences we create. It's an opportunity to do challenging, purposeful work alongside curious, collaborative colleagues, while helping drive sustainable growth for one of the world's most trusted brands.
The Role
Our AI Platform team builds the technology that powers AI-enabled products and services, for internal users and external customers. We design, build and operate the infrastructure, patterns and reusable capabilities that enable generative and agentic AI, natural language processing, predictive analytics and machine learning across the Group, from customer-facing features in our digital products to the internal tools used by colleagues across our four businesses.