Director, Software Engineering

Director Engineering Research Technology

Our people at JLL are shaping the future of real estate for a better world by combining world class services, advisory and technology for our clients. We are committed to hiring the best, most talented people and empowering them to thrive, grow meaningful careers and to find a place where they belong. Whether you've got deep experience in commercial real estate, skilled trades or technology, or you're looking to apply your relevant experience to a new industry, join our team as we help shape a brighter way forward.

Location: New York City (On-site)

Role Overview

As Senior Engineering Manager for Research Technology & AI Agents, you will lead the engineering execution of JLL's Research transformation in close partnership with the Product Manager Research Technology and the Research organization. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on building AI-powered platforms and agents that automate research workflows, democratize insights, and enable advanced analytics at global scale.

You will champion an AI-augmented engineering culture where the team delivers high-quality, reliable, and scalable outcomes at speed by orchestrating AI development tools, enterprise software agents, and strong engineering judgment. A creative and collaborative thinker at heart, you thrive on solving novel problems alongside product managers, researchers, and data scientists locking arms across disciplines to passionately build what hasn't been built before. Your role is to set the quality bar, establish effective AI-assisted development practices, and ensure the team leverages these tools to maximize velocity without compromising production standards - all in service of bringing a truly groundbreaking AI-enabled research platform to life.

This role is intentionally co-located in NYC with Product and Research to enable rapid daily iteration between product vision, technical execution, and real researcher feedback critical for effective AI agent development and deployment.

Key Responsibilities

• Engineering Leadership & Execution
• Lead and mentor high-impact engineering team, including senior engineers
• Operate as a hands-on player-coach, contributing to architecture, design, and code reviews
• Establish and evolve team practices for AI-augmented development ensuring AI coding assistants and enterprise software agents are leveraged effectively across the development lifecycle
• Set clear expectations that engineering judgment, code review rigor, and quality validation remain the responsibility of the engineer, not the AI tool
• Partnership with Product & Research
• Partner closely with the Product Management Research Technology on discovery, roadmap execution, and prioritization
• Work directly with Research users to understand current workflows and future plans and translate them into effective tooling
• Enable rapid iteration cycles through tight collaboration with Product and Research teams
• AI Agents & Platform Development
• Design and build AI agents that automate research processes and assist insight generation
• Lead integration of LLMs, agent orchestration, evaluation, and monitoring capabilities
• Build scalable services, APIs, and internal tools that support agent-driven analytics
• Define and enforce quality gates automated testing, evaluation benchmarks, and guardrails for agent-driven outputs
• Continuously evaluate and adopt emerging AI development tools and agent platforms available within the enterprise
• Architecture & Cloud Platforms
• Design and evolve cloud-native, microservice-based architectures
• Develop and maintain secure, scalable APIs consumed by internal products and platforms
• Collaborate with data, platform, security, and architecture teams to align with enterprise standards, architecture patterns, and Critical Design Reviews (CDRs)
• Participate in and drive high level design reviews for team-owned systems, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture governance
• Delivery & Ways of Working
• Support agile delivery across multiple initiatives and teams
• Manage technical backlogs, dependencies, and delivery risks
• Communicate technical decisions and progress clearly to product and senior stakeholders

Qualifications

Required

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years in an engineering leadership role
• Proven experience as a hands-on Engineering Manager (player-coach)
• Strong back-end expertise in Python, Node.js, Java, Go, or C#
• Demonstrated proficiency using AI coding tools and agents to accelerate team delivery, and experience establishing AI-augmented development practices within a team
• Strong ability to set quality standards for reviewing, validating, and debugging AI-generated code across a team
• Experience designing microservice architectures, distributed systems, and complex platforms
• Proven experience building and maintaining RESTful or gRPC APIs
• Deep experience with a major cloud platform (AWS or Azure)
• Solid experience with relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB) databases
• Strong understanding of CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and containerization (Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience partnering closely with Product Managers and business stakeholders

Preferred

• Experience building AI/ML or LLM-enabled systems, including agent-based workflows
• Experience working with data engineering, analytics, or platform teams
• Front-end experience with React, Angular, or Vue.js for internal tools
• Experience in Commercial Real Estate, Research, Financial Services, or other data-intensive domains
• Experience modernizing legacy platforms and driving technical change

This position does not provide visa sponsorship. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.

Estimated compensation for this position:

300,000.00 375,000.00 USD per year

This range is an estimate and actual compensation may differ. Final compensation packages are determined by various considerations including but not limited to candidate qualifications, location, market conditions, and internal considerations.

Location:

On-site New York, NY

If this job description resonates with you, we encourage you to apply, even if you don't meet all the requirements. We're interested in getting to know you and what you bring to the table!

Personalized benefits that support personal well-being and growth:

• 401(k) plan with matching company contributions
• Comprehensive Medical, Dental & Vision Care
• Paid parental leave at 100% of salary
• Paid Time Off and Company Holidays
• Early access to earned wages through Daily Pay