Senior Engineering Manager, AI

Shape the Future of Privacy

Usercentrics is a global leader in data privacy and privacy-led marketing solutions. We believe there is no need for a trade-off between growth and privacy compliance. Our vision is to unlock the potential of data privacy to empower a thriving digital ecosystem. We work with companies to create a healthy balance between data-driven business and privacy-led marketing for every size of enterprise. Our customers build trust with their users through improved transparency and control to drastically improve marketing and monetization, while achieving full privacy compliance.

About the Office of AI

The Office of AI owns the strategy, governance, infrastructure, and enablement of AI across Usercentrics. We sit within the CTO office and work across all departments.

Mission: enable the entire organisation to adopt AI safely, responsibly, and effectively.

About the role

We are looking for a senior leader to own Office of AI delivery end to end, across two pillars. The platforms and tooling our engineers build on, and the adoption of AI by business users in every department. One owner, both halves.

That means two kinds of outcomes, and we care about both.

For business users: measurable AI adoption in Finance, Legal, HR, Marketing, Customer Success, BI and beyond, tracked on each function's own KPIs rather than on activity. Real use cases in production that people use daily, delivered with those teams rather than handed to them.

For engineers: internal AI platforms and tooling that make an 80-plus person engineering organisation measurably faster and safer.

This is an internal-facing role. You are not building the product we sell. You would lead a small, senior team: a staff AI platform engineer, an AI GRC engineer, 2 AI enablement engineers, and an AI enablement lead. They own the build depth, so you set direction, interrogate the work, and own the outcomes rather than writing the platform yourself.

A lot is already living on both sides. On enablement, a company-wide programme with an active champion network in every department, AI literacy work, and a cross-department use-case pipeline delivering into production. On platform, an AI Hub, MCP servers, Claude connector delivery, a skill hub, AI usage analytics, and low-code automation. The team has moved quickly and is upskilling continuously, which is the only realistic way to work in this field.

What comes next is deliberately open on both sides. Growing the enablement function is one direction, a deeper platform layer another, with an LLM access gateway, RAG infrastructure, model operations and evaluation frameworks as current candidates. But AI moves faster than any roadmap holds, and a real part of this role is judging what is worth doing next rather than executing a list we hand you. You would shape the roadmap, not inherit it.

The role asks for three things at once, and we mean all three. You are a people leader who runs a mixed technical and non-technical organisation. You have the technical credibility to hire, grow, and challenge engineers at staff level and above, and you expect design feedback from every engineer on the team, not just the most senior. And you deliver AI to business users with measurable outcomes, not activity. If you only have two of these, this is probably not your role.

The AI Enablement Lead, who owns the adoption pillar day to day, reports into this role alongside the engineers. The weighting is toward enabling business users, with the platform work delivered through your team.

On the shape of it: this is a small, senior team today, four to five people, with a company-wide champion network alongside it. We intend to grow both sides, engineering and enablement, and you would help define what that growth looks like. If you are looking for a large org handed to you, this is not that. If you want to build the function that makes AI land across an entire company, it is.

Requirements

What you will do

• Own measurable AI adoption across business functions. Use-case discovery, delivery, and outcomes tracked on each function's existing KPIs. Activity is not the measure.
• Own the enablement programme: the champion network, AI literacy across the company, and the cross-department use-case pipeline.
• Build out the enablement function itself. Define what roles it needs, make the case for them, and hire them. This is a function to be grown, not a headcount to be maintained.
• Lead and grow a mixed organisation across enablement and engineering, owning hiring, performance, and career development.
• Own and shape the Office of AI platform roadmap. Grow what is already running, AI Hub, MCP servers, Claude connector delivery, the skill hub, usage analytics, low-code automation, and governance on what gets published.
• Take the platform into its next layer, and have a strong say in what that is. LLM access gateway, RAG infrastructure, model operations, and the integration patterns and engineering standards product teams build against are the current candidates.
• Lead the technical work by judgment. Interrogate designs, calibrate evaluations, and make the final call when the team disagrees. Expect your decisions to be reviewed and challenged by all Office of AI engineers, not a single senior counterpart.
• Own evaluation frameworks and the practices and guardrails that let the team move fast without shipping unreliable AI: output quality, hallucination detection, regression testing.
• Set the technical strategy for how Usercentrics applies LLMs and agents across the engineering lifecycle, in partnership with the Director of AI Engineering and the VP of Engineering.
• Partner with Security, Legal, and Platform Engineering to ship AI capabilities that are safe, governed, and adopted.
• Translate company-wide AI goals into concrete roadmaps and measurable outcomes on both sides of the role.

What you bring

• 10+ years in software engineering, with 4+ years leading and managing engineering teams.
• Technical credibility to lead engineers at staff level and above. You can interrogate architecture and evaluation design in depth and challenge engineers stronger than you. You do not need to be the strongest engineer in the room, but you cannot be bluffed by one.
• Real AI delivery experience. You have built and shipped production systems with LLMs, AI agents, RAG, or applied ML, and your platform judgment is current.
• A strong engineering foundation in distributed systems, backend platform design, and cloud architecture (Azure or GCP), with the judgement to set standards others follow.
• A track record of delivering AI or technology to non-technical business users with measurable outcomes, and of scaling enablement beyond what you personally run.
• Credibility with business stakeholders. You can sit with a Finance or Legal lead, find the use case worth doing, and hold them to an outcome on their own numbers.
• A track record of growing senior people and building healthy, high-output teams across technical and non-technical roles.
• Clear, direct communication, strong async and written.

Nice to have

• Multi-cloud (Azure, GCP) and modern DevOps.
• AI governance, evaluation, or responsible AI deployment.
• Regulated or privacy-focused domain experience.
• Developer advocate, community leader, or conference speaker recognition.
• Former founder or CTO experience.

Benefits

Why join Usercentrics?

This role sits in the Office of AI, close to where decisions get made, with direct access to leadership and a clear mandate to make an impact across the whole engineering organisation.

• Joining Usercentrics means becoming part of a fast-growing, diverse and international team of tech enthusiasts and entrepreneurially-minded who build our success story together.
• Company culture is important to us. We strive to continuously develop a positive, vibrant and inspiring environment that enables everyone to thrive both personally and professionally.
• Get involved. We have plenty of initiatives and love to see people from all departments enthusiastically participating and shaping our future together in different cross-department projects.
• Your work-life balance is important to us too. We offer flexible working hours, hybrid working, and the possibility of workcations (in accordance with our company policy).
• We always remember to have fun along the way, both in our day-to-day work and at our regular team events on site in our offices in Munich, Copenhagen, Odense, Lisbon and Prague, or online with our offices in New York and Buenos Aires.

Some of our benefits

• Development budget for every employee: €800 per year
• Job-related language courses (English, German, Czech, Spanish, etc.): €350 per year
• Hybrid working policy with the option to take a workcation (up to 60 days per year)
• Online yoga sessions
• Events: team buildings, happy hours, parties/get-togethers, and occasional company-covered breakfasts or lunches (in-office, across offices, online, and in person)
• Gifts: we celebrate life and work milestones at UC (work anniversaries, new baby arrivals, and similar occasions)
• Snacks, fruit, coffee, and drinks in the office

ABOUT US

We are driven by our values #BeBrave, #BetterTogether, #LeadbyExample, #InnovateWithPurpose, #PassionForPrivacy, #GiveBack and #ComeAsYouAre. They show what we believe in and how we work. They help make our team special and guide us in everything we do. They're the heart of our company and inspire us to do our best every day.

We strive to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment (DEI) where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered to reach their full potential. We believe that our different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are our greatest strengths — so we are committed to building with them as we foster innovation and drive our success.

We recognize that this is an ongoing journey. We commit to listening and to continuous learning, growth, and improvement. By embracing DEI principles, we will create a more just and equitable society, and we are proud to play our part in making this vision a reality.

We are #BetterTogether.