Manager Engineering

This Full time on site position offers great opportunities for career growth.

AI Labs & the Team AI Labs is Paylocity's team for rapid AI experimentation - we test and validate new AI-driven ideas quickly, with a bias toward hands-on building over long planning cycles.

We're growing a new, early-career-focused engineering team based in the Rochester, NY area, and looking for a technical, hands‑on manager to lead it from the ground up.

You'll help shape both the team and its technical direction, working across real AI Labs projects from day one.

This role reports to the Director for AI Labs.

You've led and mentored engineers before, ideally early-career talent specifically, and know how to balance hands‑on technical guidance with giving people room to own real work.

A servant leader: you remove blockers and create opportunities for your team, and direct as needed.

A strong communicator who shifts naturally between technical depth with your team and business framing with executives and stakeholders.

Strong technical skills not tied to one stack, comfortable diving deep across a wide range of technologies and project types.

Familiarity with .NET/C#.

Hands‑on experience designing, building, and operating cloud‑based solutions in AWS, with a solid grasp of modern cloud architecture, scalability, security, and operational practice.

Real experience building applications that use AI technologies directly - integrating AI services, LLMs, or other intelligent features into actual products, not just reading about them.

Fluent in frontier AI tools as part of your own workflow (Claude, OpenAI, Copilot, or similar). You use them day to day, not just know they exist.

A strong enough grasp of what your team builds and why to pressure‑test any technical tradeoff they make.

Genuinely passionate about exploring new ideas and tracking where AI is heading as you experiment with what you learn.

Comfortable with ambiguity, wearing whatever hat the moment calls for since this team's work is very exploratory.

Curious and growth‑oriented, adaptable to change.

You enjoy the creative exploration with your team as much as the delivery.

This role is as much about how your team learns as what it ships.

Based in the Rochester, NY area, working hybrid alongside your team in Pittsford - this is about building a tight, in‑person culture for a founding early‑career team, not an attendance mandate.

• Lead and manage a founding team of early‑career engineers, co‑located with you in Rochester, ensuring their work stays aligned with AI Labs' bets and Paylocity's broader goals.
• Mentor and coach technically and professionally
• Create real growth opportunities, recognize achievement publicly, and reward high performance appropriately.
• Give regular, direct feedback on individual performance.
• Build a team you invest in deeply and expect to see graduate into other engineering roles across Paylocity.
• Actively source and hire engineers locally; run technical interviews and screens for your team.
• Help lead the summer internship program based in Rochester, including selecting each year's cohort and mentoring interns day to day.
• Build and maintain Paylocity's relationship with local universities, including RIT, to establish a consistent, repeatable early‑career pipeline.
• Represent Paylocity at campus events and technical community groups in the Rochester area as opportunities arise.
• Drive technical execution and delivery of high‑quality, scalable solutions.
• Dive into complex systems and concepts deeply enough to credibly guide your team through them.
• Ensure your team's work follows security best practices and compliance standards.
• Facilitate and continuously improve your team's processes.
• Partner directly with business stakeholders and…