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Manager; AI Evaluation Engineering

Caterpillar · Chicago, IL · $147,760–$240,110 a year · Full time

Posted Sep 21, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Oct 6, 2026

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Likely interview questions for this role

Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.

About your past

Tell me about a time you built or led a team where you had to identify skill gaps and close them.

What they are checking: Whether they actively develop people, which the posting stresses as part of owning team performance.

Tell me about a time your evaluation results turned out to be misleading. How did you find out?

What they are checking: Humility about measurement and the habit of checking whether metrics actually track what users experience.

What would you do

A product team wants to ship a generative AI feature next week, and your evaluation shows a hallucination rate you're not comfortable with. What do you do?

What they are checking: Whether they can hold a quality bar under pressure while offering a realistic path forward instead of a flat no.

How would you explain evaluation results to an executive who just wants to know if the product is ready?

What they are checking: Ability to translate statistical results into a clear decision and its risks for a non-technical audience.

How do you balance your team's time between building evaluation tooling and running evaluations for many product teams?

What they are checking: Whether they invest in reusable infrastructure rather than staying stuck doing one-off manual reviews.

About the work

How would you design an evaluation for a digital assistant that answers dealer questions about equipment and parts?

What they are checking: Whether they can turn a fuzzy goal like helpfulness into measurable criteria, test sets and pass thresholds.

What is your view on using an LLM as a judge, and when would you not trust it?

What they are checking: Whether they understand the bias and drift of automated graders and know when human review is required.

How do you evaluate an intelligent agent that takes multiple steps and calls tools, compared to a single chatbot answer?

What they are checking: Understanding that agents fail in the path, not only the final answer, so evaluation must cover the steps too.

How do you build and maintain a test dataset that stays representative as real usage changes?

What they are checking: Awareness that stale evaluation sets give false confidence once customers start using the product differently.

How do you test for safety issues like prompt injection, data leakage or harmful advice in a customer-facing assistant?

What they are checking: Whether they treat adversarial testing as core work, not an afterthought, for products that reach customers and dealers.

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The full job description

As published by Caterpillar.

Career Area: Technology, Digital and Data Job Description: Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc. When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it. Job Summary: Join the AI Engineering team of Cat Digital and take charge of leading a team dedicated to evaluating and validating our advanced generative AI solutions—including intelligent agents, digital assistants, and other innovative capabilities. You will shape the development of cutting-edge products that redefine how customers and dealers interact with technology through AI-driven experiences. What You Will Do: • Providing strong technical support and clear direction to ensure the team is aligned with company goals and capable of evaluating advanced AI projects. • Overseeing the performance of both individual team members and the team as a whole, fostering a culture of learning by identifying and addressing training and development needs. • Taking ownership of the quality of AI engineering products, making sure all solutions are robust, reliable, and meet high standards. • Establishing and supervising the implementation of engineering best practices to maintain consistency and excellence in development processes. What You Will Have: • Products and Services: Knowledge of major products and services and product and service groups; ability to apply knowledge of product and service appropriately to diverse situations. • Software Development: Knowledge of software development tools and activities; ability to produce software products or systems in line with product requirements. • Software Development Life Cycle: Knowledge of software development life cycle; ability to use a structured methodology for delivering and managing new or enhanced software products to the marketplace. • Software Quality Assurance and Testing: Knowledge of software quality assurance and testing; ability to apply appropriate processes, tools, and techniques for assuring a high level of quality in computer software products and systems. Considerations For Top Candidates: • Proven experience leading software quality, test automation, validation, and AI evaluation teams, with the ability to scale processes, tools, metrics, and engineering practices across multiple products and enterprise initiatives. • Demonstrated success delivering enterprise-scale software and GenAI solutions across hybrid cloud and embedded/edge environments, leveraging modern software engineering practices including CI/CD, automated testing, incident management, feature flags, and progressive deployment strategies (e.g., blue/green and canary deployments). • Deep expertise in GenAI architecture and system design, including LLMs, SLMs, multimodal, speech, and real-time models; prompt engineering; agentic systems; tool use and orchestration; RAG architectures; vector databases, embeddings, and chunking strategies; fine-tuning techniques such as LoRA; and emerging standards including MCP and A2A. • Hands-on experience with AI development and evaluation ecosystems, including Azure, AWS, GCP, Azure AI Foundry, SageMaker, Bedrock, Snowflake Cortex, LangChain, LangGraph, Langfuse, Arize, LangSmith, Humanloop, Ragas, DeepEval, Phoenix, or similar technologies. • Deep understanding of AI evaluation methodologies and the challenges of non-deterministic systems, including metric design, RAG quality assessment, output reliability, safety evaluation, A/B testing, human-in-the-loop validation, and balancing deterministic and probabilistic testing approaches. • Expertise in modern AI observability and monitoring practices, including tracing, telemetry, evaluation data collection, root-cause analysis, and the use of AI technologies to enhance testing through automated test generation, synthetic data creation, scenario expansion, and LLM-assisted evaluation. Summary Pay Range: $147,760.00 - $240,110.00 Compensation and benefits offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, job level, market location, job-related knowledge, skills, individual performance and experience. Please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Caterpillar. Benefits: Subject to plan eligibility, terms, and guidelines. This is a summary list of benefits. • Medical, dental, and vision benefits* • Paid time off plan (Vacation, Holidays, Volunteer, etc.)* • 401(k) savings plans* • Health Savings Account (HSA)* • Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs)* • Health Lifestyle Programs* • Employee Assistance Program* • Voluntary Benefits and Employee Discounts* • Career Development* • Incentive bonus* • Disability benefits • Life Insurance • Parental leave • Adoption benefits • Tuition Reimbursement * These benefits also apply to part-time employees Visa Sponsorship is not available for this position. Posting Dates: September 21, 2026 - October 4, 2026 Any offer of employment is conditioned upon the successful completion of a drug screen. Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer, Including Veterans and Individuals with Disabilities. Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply. Not ready to apply? Join our Talent Community .

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