Sr Machine Learning Engineering Manager - AI Quality and Governance

Join Workiva as a Sr Machine Learning Engineering Manager - AI Quality and Governance and help establish how we build, evaluate, release, and operate trustworthy AI products at scale. You will lead a multidisciplinary team of software, machine learning, and quality engineers responsible for two connected missions: advancing end-to-end quality across Workiva's AI platform and products, and building shared evaluation and governance capabilities that make our AI systems measurable, observable, reliable, and ready for enterprise use.

Your team's scope spans generative AI and agentic products, including AI platform services, agent frameworks and runtimes, conversational experiences, and RAG/knowledge systems. You will partner across Product, Engineering, Data Science, Security, Risk, and Legal to establish practical quality standards and embed evaluation and governance throughout the AI development lifecycle.

What You'll Do

Leadership & Team Development

Lead, mentor, and develop a multidisciplinary team of software, ML, and quality engineers
Build a culture of technical excellence, quality ownership, experimentation, and continuous improvement
Establish clear team priorities while balancing platform investments, product needs, and enterprise risk
Recruit engineers with complementary expertise across software quality, ML evaluation, platform engineering, and governance automation

AI Product Quality

Define and drive a comprehensive quality strategy for Workiva's AI platform and products, spanning unit, integration, end-to-end, performance, resilience, security, and production testing
Establish measurable quality bars, release-readiness criteria, and automated quality gates for AI and agentic capabilities
Advance testing approaches for nondeterministic systems, including RAG pipelines, agents, prompts, models, tools, and multi-step workflows
Detect regressions, model or data drift, unsafe behavior, and degraded customer experiences before and after release

AI Evaluation Platform

Lead architecture and delivery of a scalable, self-service evaluation platform for generative AI, RAG, and agentic systems
Enable teams to create, manage, version, and reuse evaluation datasets, golden test sets, task-specific metrics, graders, and benchmarks
Support deterministic checks, statistical metrics, model-based graders, human evaluation, adversarial testing, and domain-expert review
Build capabilities for offline evaluation, pre-release regression testing, online experimentation, production sampling, and continuous evaluation
Ensure evaluation results are reproducible, explainable, actionable, and integrated into developer workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and operational dashboards

AI Governance & Assurance

Translate Workiva's Responsible AI principles into practical engineering controls and platform capabilities
Build governance into the AI lifecycle through traceability, lineage, versioning, documentation, risk classification, approval workflows, and auditable evidence
Partner with Security, Legal, Privacy, Compliance, and Risk teams to define controls that support enterprise and regulated use cases
Enable inventories and traceability across models, prompts, datasets, evaluations, tools, knowledge sources, and deployed AI features

Cross-Functional Leadership

Collaborate with Product, Program Management, UX, UXR, Data Science, Security, Legal, Risk, and engineering leaders to define quality expectations and roadmaps
Influence engineering teams across Workiva to adopt shared evaluation standards, testing practices, observability, and release controls
Communicate complex technical tradeoffs, quality signals, and risk findings clearly to technical and non-technical audiences

Operational Excellence

Ensure the evaluation and governance platform is secure, scalable, reliable, observable, and cost-effective
Define service-level objectives and meaningful operational and quality metrics
Champion production readiness, incident response, root-cause analysis, and continuous operational improvement

What You'll Need

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field (or equivalent experience)
10+ years in software engineering, ML engineering, quality engineering, or related roles, including 4+ years leading an engineering team
Strong software engineering and systems-design fundamentals, with experience delivering and operating production SaaS or platform capabilities
Demonstrated experience establishing automated quality practices for distributed, cloud-based products
Practical understanding of the generative AI development lifecycle and challenges of evaluating nondeterministic systems
Experience with generative AI concepts: LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector/hybrid search, agents, tool use, and prompt orchestration
Experience defining measurable quality criteria using data, experimentation, telemetry, and production signals
Experience with cloud-native architectures on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Proven ability to lead senior individual contributors, navigate tehhnical disagreements, and build high-performance cultures
Strong communication and cross-functional leadership skills

Preferred Qualifications

Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, ML, Data Science, or related field.
Experience building or operating AI/ML evaluation, experimentation, observability, model-governance, or ML platform capabilities
Experience evaluating RAG and agentic systems, including retrieval quality, groundedness, task completion, tool use, and safety
Familiarity with evaluation techniques: golden datasets, statistical metrics, model-based graders, human evaluation, red teaming, A/B testing, and drift/regression detection
Working knowledge of ML/AI lifecycle practices: dataset management, model/prompt versioning, experiment tracking, deployment, monitoring, and feedback loops
Experience translating Responsible AI, model-risk, privacy, security, or regulatory requirements into sca