Associate Engineering Manager

Sparq is a modern product engineering partner that helps organizations modernize in the age of AI. The Associate Engineering Manager will lead the weekly operations of The Shop, ensuring effective team collaboration and delivery of AI-native consulting projects.

Responsibilities:

• Own the weekly rhythm (Monday kickoff to Friday demo) so nothing slips through the cracks
• You'll help onboard colleagues into the shop, turn them into teams, and help shape their growth with projects and problem sets
• Watch the Friday demos and give specific, useful feedback: what landed, what didn’t, and how to make it better
• Help builders get unstuck — often by helping them say clearly what they’re trying to build, not by writing code for them. ("You’re not blocked because you don’t know Python. You’re blocked because we haven’t defined the problem yet.")
• Coach a consulting mindset: understand the business problem, find the champion, challenge the assumption
• Be the operational point of contact for The Shop: the person who knows who, what, when, and where
• Give clear, fair feedback to our practice leaders on how people are engaging and growing
• Help us decide which parts of this job should become software/tooling - and build toward that

Requirements:

• Consulting background — ideally 2-3 years client-facing at a mid-size firm. You've run projects and sat across the table from clients
• You give hard feedback well — direct, specific, and kind enough that people come back for more
• You're organized in a way that makes chaos manageable — you build structure where it's missing
• You're AI-forward: comfortable with AI tools, curious about how they're applied, and clear-eyed about how they change what 'blocked' means
• You can tell when a 'technical' answer is real and when it's fluff — without being a developer yourself
• You used to write code, or work close enough to it to direct traffic confidently
• Conceptual familiarity with Git and the software development lifecycle
• You can make a crisp short video or a clean one-pager
• Depth in a vertical — financial services, healthcare, supply chain, or similar
• AI-first culture — you'll work alongside the latest tools and help shape how we use them