Senior Manager, Applied AI Research

Gen is a global company dedicated to powering Digital Freedom through its trusted consumer brands including Norton, Avast, Life Lock, Money Lion and more. Our combined heritage is rooted in financial empowerment and cyber safety for the first digital generations, and today we deliver award-winning cybersecurity, online privacy, identity protection and financial wellness solutions to nearly 500 million users in more than 150 countries.

Together, we share a collective passion and vision to protect consumers and help them grow, manage and secure their digital and financial lives. We’re always looking for smart, fearless and high-impact talent who see AI as a teammate – leveraging it to move faster and deliver meaningful results.

When you’re part of Gen, you’ll have the flexibility, tools and support to do your best work and grow your career – from flexible working options and time off to competitive pay, benefits and well-being programs.

At Gen, we are scrappy and relentlessly customer driven. We create room for healthy debate, experimentation and continuous learning, and we seek out people with different experiences, identities and ideas to join our team. You’ll work with people who back each other, respect each other and understand that our differences are a competitive advantage.

As Senior Manager, Applied AI Research, you will provide hands-on technical leadership across a portfolio of applied AI initiatives that protect over 500 million users worldwide, spanning Small Language Models, reinforcement learning, agentic systems, computer vision and classical machine learning. You will shape the architecture, modeling choices and production path for these programs while managing and growing a small team of 3-5 Research Engineers responsible for end-to-end delivery of applied AI, from problem framing and data curation through model training, customization and evaluation to deployment, monitoring and iteration at massive scale.

This role blends technical leadership with people management. You will lead the team technically by setting direction, shaping architectures and staying close to the models and code, while also growing engineers and owning delivery. You will ensure that the models your team builds reach production and contribute to Gen’s cybersecurity mission.

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across multiple applied AI work streams, including Small Language Models, reinforcement learning, agentic AI, computer vision and classical ML.
• Drive architecture, modeling choices and productionization decisions with your team of Research Engineers.
• Manage, mentor and grow a small team of 3-5 Research Engineers, including hiring, performance management, career development and day-to-day technical coaching.
• Keep the team focused, unblocked and outcome-oriented.
• Personally contribute to the hardest parts of the work by prototyping novel approaches, reviewing and improving model designs, and guiding training-run debugging on GPU clusters.
• Set the bar for research and engineering quality across the team.
• Own the full applied-AI lifecycle for your area, from problem framing and data strategy through model training, fine-tuning and evaluation to deployment, observability and continuous improvement in production systems serving 500M+ users.
• Champion an “always ship to production” team principle and partner with Platform, MLOps and Product Engineering teams to ensure models are deployed, monitored and measurably improving user outcomes.
• Translate business and security priorities into a concrete applied-AI roadmap and sequence priorities across multiple domains.
• Communicate trade-offs to senior leadership and report on delivery, model performance and impact.
• Estab…