Senior Manager, Engineering; AI-Enabled Product Builder, RIA

At Nerd Wallet, we're on a mission to bring clarity to all of life's financial decisions and every great mission needs a team of exceptional Nerds. We've built an inclusive, flexible, and candid culture where you're empowered to grow, take smart risks, and be unapologetically yourself. Whether remote or in-office, we support how you thrive best. We invest in your well-being, development, and ability to make an impact because when one Nerd levels up, we all do.

Nerd Wallet's RIA (Registered Investment Advisory) team builds and operates the platforms that power our financial advisory experiences. They own our lead generation marketplace, content rendering infrastructure, and the systems supporting our wealth management firms' business and website. We're looking for a rare kind of leader: part builder, part operator, and fully in command of what AI makes possible right now.

Someone who can keep a high-traffic financial platform running with precision today while rewriting how their team works tomorrow.

This role reports to the GM of RIA.

• Lead a small team of engineers, product managers, and designers, running the org as it exists today while actively transforming how it operates tomorrow

• Serve as a hands‑on technical force multiplier: architect systems, prototype with emerging AI tools, and model what great building looks like in practice

• Own your team's AI transformation strategy: identify where LLMs, agents, and AI‑assisted workflows unlock the most leverage, deploy them deliberately, and measure the impact on shipping velocity and output quality

• Architect the decision of when to build vs. buy vs. orchestrate: you can assess AI vendor capabilities critically, know when a third‑party model or tool is the right call, and when you need to own it

• Own the roadmap alongside Product and business partners; translate fuzzy business goals into focused, executable technical strategy

• Drive pragmatic, high‑leverage engineering decisions: choose the right tool for the job, not the trendiest one, and know the difference

• Navigate organizational complexity with confidence. You know how to build consensus, move initiatives through cross‑functional processes, and get things done without losing your edge

• Balance the tension between speed and stability for high‑traffic, mission‑critical financial systems

• Cultivate a culture of curiosity, ownership, and continuous learning, pushing your team to work AI‑natively, not just AI‑aware

• Ensure systems owned by the team meet availability, performance, Observability and security standards with a practical, risk‑calibrated approach

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent building and shipping in a startup or early‑stage environment

• 3+ years managing an engineering team, ideally a cross‑functional one including product and/or design

• Demonstrated ability to operate at a Staff or higher level technical depth alongside management responsibilities

• Demonstrated history of building and deploying AI‑powered systems in production— not just integrating APIs, but owning reliability, observability, prompt pipelines, and eval frameworks for LLM‑backed features

• Deep, hands‑on familiarity with the current AI tooling landscape: you have opinions on agent frameworks, RAG architectures, model selection tradeoffs, and what "production‑ready" actually means for GenAI systems

• Hands‑on full‑stack software engineering skills with experience in modern web systems (NextJS, Type Script, AWS + strong plus)

• Genuine hacker mentality: you find the fastest, smartest path to a working solution and have the judgment to know when "good enough" is right and when it isn't

• Strong business acumen. You think about ROI, user impact, and revenue, not just technical elegance

• Proven ability to operate effectively inside a larger, more process‑heavy organization without losing the startup bias for action

• Experience building scalable, reliable systems with a pragmatic approach to architecture and technical debt

• Strong communicator who can translate between technical and non‑technical stakeholders and influence without authority

• Comfortable with the compliance and…