FamilySearch Mgr, Software Development 1 (Lehi, UT) at Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Overview

Engineering Lead for the Assisted Tree Building Team. Drive the development and delivery of automated tree building solutions leveraging modern AI technologies and processes. This role requires the ability to reliably commute to our Lehi, Utah office for at least one in-office day per week, with additional on-site presence as needed based on business priorities.

Role

This role requires regular on-site presence at our Lehi, Utah office, with a minimum of one day per week in person. Additional in-office time may be required based on business needs or critical initiatives.

This role combines people leadership, delivery accountability, and hands‑on technical leadership in building and operating AI/ML‑powered production systems.

We are seeking an Engineering Manager / Engineering Lead to lead a single, full‑stack agile team and drive the development and delivery of automated tree‑building (ATB) solutions leveraging modern AI technologies and processes. This role defines and drives the technical vision to use AI to construct family trees from all available data, both from FamilySearch and from third parties. The primary objective is to significantly increase the number of ordinance‑ready names available to Church members.

This individual works with divine guidance to provide or support technology that furthers the mission of the Church and reflects the eternal impact of the gospel.
We value early, mid and late-career candidates and encourage all applicants with the posted skills and abilities to apply.

About The Company

Responsibilities

Leadership & Team Responsibilities

• Manage and coach a full‑stack agile team of 8–10 engineers.
• Lead rapid sprint cycles, balancing experimentation and innovation with production stability and operational excellence.
• Partner closely with Product Management, UX, and technical stakeholders to define and deliver solutions.
• Own team execution, including backlog management, feature prioritization, sprint commitments, and quarterly planning.
• Continuously improve team processes and ways of working.
• Keeps abreast of industry best practices and emerging trends and technologies.
• Champion FamilySearch values and contribute positively to team culture.
• Represent the team as an engineering leader, aligning work and outcomes across dependent teams.
• Maintain accountability for team and individual performance against delivery goals.
• Provide regular coaching and mentoring with a focus on growth, accountability, and results.
• Participates in the Problem Management process.
• Complies with policies, standards, and regulatory requirements and ensures others are doing the same.
• The employee is authorized, in partnership with HR, to hire or fire employees and recommends advancement, promotion or any other change of status of employees within their reporting line 

Technical & Delivery Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and operation of production AI/ML systems for genealogical tree building.
• Provide hands‑on technical leadership in applying AI to structured problem domains, including graph‑ and tree‑based reasoning systems.
• Guide the architecture and use of vector and graph databases for retrieval, inference, and scalable AI workflows.
• Ensure strong ML engineering rigor, including model evaluation, quality monitoring, confidence metrics, and production validation.
• Oversee cloud‑native architectures (AWS), with a focus on scalability, reliability, privacy, and AI workload requirements.
• Sustain and enhance existing production systems while delivering new AI-backed capabilities in parallel.
• Proactively identify and remove technical and organizational roadblocks to enable consistent delivery across complex dependencies.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, closely related field or equivalent experience.
• 10 years of technical experience including two years demonstrating a progression in leadership roles and three years deep technical experience in software development and IT methodologies
• Ability to effectively manage a team of highly skilled engineers.
• Key responsibility for design and implementation of large-scale enterprise systems.
• Strong understanding of Agile software development methodologies and principles.
• Experience designing and building multi-tier systems.
• Database experience.
• Expert-level skills in engineering and programming, relevant software development technologies, analytical, diagnostic, and troubleshooting skills, web technology, and programming methodology (preferred extensive Java and Python experience).
• Familiarity with cloud-based platforms and services (preferred AWS experience).
• Strong familiarity with continuous integration and continuous delivery principles.
• Ability to communicate effectively with different levels of management, work with vendors, interact with customers, and present solutions.
• Deep understanding and experience with AI development and production deployments (ML-Ops).
• Demonstrated DevOps leadership experience, including ownership of system reliability, availability, monitoring, incident response, and operational health of mission-critical production systems.
• Deep understanding and experience with big data analysis and tools such as Apache Spark.
• Proven ability to plan, track, and manage multiple high-priority initiatives and dependencies across teams, balancing competing priorities while ensuring alignment, execution discipline, and delivery of strategic outcomes.

Preferred:

• Master's degree

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