Senior Manager, AI Engineering and Operations
ICON plc is a world-leading healthcare intelligence and clinical research organization. We’re proud to foster an inclusive environment driving innovation and excellence, and we welcome you to join us on our mission to shape the future of clinical development.
Senior Manager, AI Engineering & Operations
Dublin, Ireland - hybrid
As a Senior AI Engineering Operations Manager at ICON, you will play a pivotal role in shaping and delivering our Enterprise AI capability. You will lead the engineering operations behind our central AI platform, multi-agent framework, and agent services layer—forming the foundation for AI innovation across the organisation.
This is a high-impact leadership role where you will combine technical expertise with people leadership to ensure our AI solutions are secure, scalable, reliable, and built to production-grade standards, enabling transformative outcomes across our global business.
What You Will Do:
In this role, you will be responsible for the end-to-end leadership, delivery, and operational excellence of ICON’s AI engineering platform and services.
Key Responsibilities:
• Lead the development, stability, and continuous improvement of the central AI platform, multi-agent framework, and agent services, ensuring high performance and scalability
• Drive engineering excellence through best practices in code quality, CI/CD, automated testing, and deployment governance
• Establish robust monitoring, observability, and incident management processes to maintain production-grade reliability and service availability
• Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing cross-functional engineering team, fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning
• Oversee resource planning and delivery across multiple concurrent AI programmes, ensuring alignment with strategic priorities and timelines
• Embed security, compliance, and responsible AI principles into all engineering outputs, ensuring adherence to regulatory and organisational standards
• Act as a key engineering partner to stakeholders, contributing to strategic planning, technology roadmaps, and the evaluation of emerging AI tools and frameworks
Your Profile:
To succeed in this role, you will bring a strong blend of technical depth, leadership capability, and a passion for building scalable AI solutions in a fast-evolving environment.
Required Qualifications and Experience:
• 8+experience in software engineering with a track record of leading and developing engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience designing, deploying, and operating AI/ML systems in production environments.
• Experience with agentic AI, multi-agent systems, or modern LLM-based frameworks.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architectures, DevOps/MLOps practices, and platform engineering.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complex technology programmes and engage effectively with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, IT, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• Microsoft certifications (e.g. Microsoft 365, Azure, Power Platform, AI) highly desirable.
Why Join ICON?
At ICON, you will be part of a global organisation at the forefront of innovation in healthcare intelligence and clinical research. This role offers the opportunity to shape enterprise-wide AI capabilities, work with cutting-edge technologies, and make a meaningful impact by enabling smarter, data-driven decision-making across the organisation.
We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where our people can thrive, develop, and make a difference.
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What ICON can offer you:
Our success depends on the quality of our people. That’s why we’ve made it a priority to build a diverse culture that rewards high performance and nurtures talent.
In addition to your competitive salary, ICON offers a range of additional benefits. Our benefits are designed to be competitive within each country and are focused on well-being and work life balance opportunities for you and your family.
Our benefits examples include:
- Various annual leave entitlements
- A range of health insurance offerings to suit you and your family’s needs.
- Competitive retirement planning offerings to maximize savings and plan with confidence for the years ahead.
- Global Employee Assistance Programme, LifeWorks, offering 24-hour access to a global network of over 80,000 independent specialized professionals who are there to support you and your family’s well-being.
- Life assurance
- Flexible country-specific optional benefits, including childcare vouchers, bike purchase schemes, discounted gym memberships, subsidized travel passes, health assessments, among others.
Visit our careers site to read more about the benefits ICON offers.
At ICON, inclusion & belonging are fundamental to our culture and values. We’re dedicated to providing an inclusive and accessible environment for all candidates. ICON is committed to providing a workplace free of discrimination and harassment. All qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status.
If, because of a medical condition or disability, you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application process, or in order to perform the essential functions of a position, please let us know or submit a request here
Interested in the role, but unsure if you meet all of the requirements? We would encourage you to apply regardless – there’s every chance you’re exactly what we’re looking for here at ICON whether it is for this or other roles.
Are you a current ICON Employee? Please click here to apply
