Engineering Manager
Engineering Managers at AI companies lead engineering teams across the delivery cycle—hiring and developing engineers, setting technical direction in collaboration with senior ICs, owning roadmap and execution, and partnering with product and design counterparts. The work is the standard engineering management craft: 1:1s and growth conversations, architecture reviews and technical trade-off decisions, on-call and incident response, and translating cross-functional priorities into team plans. Technical scope varies widely—some EMs run platform and infrastructure teams, others run product engineering, others run ML or research-adjacent teams—but the canonical role is recognizable across software companies generally, with AI workloads as the specific domain rather than a different management discipline. These managers typically sit within engineering organizations as first-line or second-line leaders, reporting to directors or VPs depending on team size.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Building and scaling high-performing engineering teams through hiring, onboarding, and talent development
Defining technical direction, architecture, and engineering standards for teams and products
Driving end-to-end product delivery from concept through production, including planning and prioritization
Mentoring and coaching engineers on technical skills, career development, and leadership growth
Cross-functional collaboration with product, design, sales, and other engineering teams
Translating customer needs and feedback into engineering priorities and roadmap decisions
Managing incident response, operational reliability, and production system health
Building and operating large-scale distributed systems with high availability and performance requirements
Establishing processes, guardrails, and best practices for secure, scalable system development
Designing and implementing infrastructure for cloud-based platforms and services
Hands-on technical contribution in critical or early-stage product areas while managing teams
Leading applied AI and machine learning systems from research into production deployment
Designing observability, monitoring, and telemetry systems for production infrastructure
Establishing and scaling internal platform engineering to improve organization-wide productivity
Building and managing forward-deployed or customer-embedded engineering teams
Integrating AI-assisted development tools and practices into engineering workflows and processes
Managing high-agency, ownership-focused teams in fast-paced, ambiguous environments
Communicating technical vision and decisions clearly to stakeholders at all levels
Building inclusive, psychologically safe team cultures emphasizing continuous improvement
Conducting structured performance management, feedback delivery, and career development conversations
Operating with urgency and bias toward action in early-stage or rapidly scaling environments
Engaging directly with enterprise customers and partners to understand needs and validate solutions
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
235 open Engineering Manager jobs across 58 companies.
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