Development Manager- AI Product

As a Development Manager at Kanerika, you will play a crucial role in bringing structure, rigour, and technical depth to the development of AI products. You will be involved in system design, architecture decisions, sprint execution, code reviews, and shaping engineering culture. Leading a team of high-energy engineers, your focus will be on developing AI products that combine data analytics and enterprise software expertise. Key Responsibilities: - Establish and drive a structured, repeatable approach to product development, covering planning, architecture, sprint execution, and release discipline. - Own the end-to-end development lifecycle, ensuring requirements gathering, system design, build, test, deployment, and continuous improvement are carried out effectively. - Implement engineering best practices such as code quality standards, documentation requirements, design reviews, and testing frameworks to scale with the team and products. - Provide clarity and predictability to delivery while maintaining the team's pace and engineering ambition. - Lead system design and architecture decisions for AI-powered product features, emphasizing scalability, cost-efficiency, and long-term sustainability. - Drive cost optimization strategies for AI features, including model selection, inference efficiency, caching strategies, and resource allocation. - Conduct code and design reviews to maintain a high technical bar and facilitate team growth through constructive feedback. - Identify technical risks early and make well-reasoned decisions on trade-offs between build quality, speed, and scalability. - Champion best practices for AI-based product development, including responsible AI integration, engineering governance, evaluation frameworks, and AI observability. Team & Delivery: - Lead a team of intelligent engineers, focusing on amplifying their output rather than micromanaging their time. - Facilitate effective sprint planning, retrospectives, and delivery cycles to keep the team aligned with product priorities. - Collaborate with the Product Leader to translate the product roadmap into actionable development plans, providing regular progress updates and proactively addressing risk factors, dependencies, and blockers. Required Qualifications: Experience Technical Skills: - 1012 years of experience in software or product development with a strong hands-on engineering background. - Minimum 3 years of experience leading a development team and shipping production-grade software. - Proven experience in building structured development processes in fast-paced, product-driven environments. - Prior exposure to AI-integrated products like LLM-based features, ML pipelines, or intelligent automation is advantageous. - Proficiency in Java for backend development and working knowledge of Python for AI/ML integration and data processing. - Understanding of system design principles, distributed systems, API design, data modeling, and scalability patterns. - Hands-on experience with AI/LLM integration, prompt engineering, cost optimization in AI workloads, and responsible AI practices. - Familiarity with DevOps best practices, cloud platforms (preferably Azure), and modern SaaS architecture. - Experience integrating LLMs, AI agents, or conversational AI capabilities into enterprise SaaS products. Mindset & Soft Skills: - Structured thinker who brings clarity to fast-moving environments. - Problem solver who enjoys untangling complexity. - Eager learner interested in emerging technologies, especially in AI. - Clear communicator capable of translating technical decisions for both engineers and product leadership. - Sets engineering standards through quality thinking and example. Good to have: - Familiarity with Microsoft Fabric, Azure OpenAI, or similar AI/data platform services. - Experience with AI inference cost optimization strategies, observability, and monitoring practices. - Exposure to data analytics, BI, or agentic AI product development. In this role, you will lead the development of AI products at Kanerika, focusing on enterprise data analytics, conversational AI, and intelligent automation. You will contribute to products enabling natural language querying of complex data, surfacing insights rapidly, and delivering governed answers across diverse sources. Your efforts will shape the architecture of these products, ensure responsible AI integration, and maintain consistency and quality in the evolving portfolio. Education: - Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field. As a Development Manager at Kanerika, you will play a crucial role in bringing structure, rigour, and technical depth to the development of AI products. You will be involved in system design, architecture decisions, sprint execution, code reviews, and shaping engineering culture. Leading a team of high-energy engineers, your focus will be on developing AI products that combine data analytics and e