Associate Engineering Manager – AI Platform

Product Introduction

SmartBear is leading the charge to productionize the use of Generative AI throughout the software development lifecycle in ways that go far beyond the chatbots proliferating in UIs everywhere. The AI Platform team sits at the heart of this mission, owning two critical areas of the product.

First, the team builds and maintains the APIs that serve AI capabilities to downstream products across SmartBear's portfolio. These APIs sit in front of a secure infrastructure layer responsible for managing calls into Large Language Models (LLMs), handling streaming responses, storing conversation history, and tracking the cost of AI calls.

Second, the team owns SmartBear's framework for running AI Agents – including the security, scalability, and reliability of the entire Agent execution system. This includes storing runtime data such as when agents are triggered, which system, user, or organization initiated a run, and capturing raw cost information for downstream reporting and governance.

Role Summary

As an Associate Engineering Manager on the AI Platform team, you will balance technical depth with people leadership. You will guide a growing team of engineers, drive delivery on foundational AI infrastructure, and stay connected to the codebase through architecture reviews, technical guidance, and hands-on contributions. You bring 2–4 years of management experience paired with a strong foundation as a practitioner who has shipped production code.

Job Responsibilities

People Leadership

• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of 6+ engineers across varying experience levels, fostering a culture of ownership, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.
• Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations to support individual growth aligned with team and company goals.
• Actively participate in recruiting and hiring, including contributing to the current open engineering role on the team.
• Identify skill gaps on the team and partner with senior leadership and HR to develop targeted growth plans or address hiring needs.

Technical Oversight & Delivery

• Own the delivery roadmap for the AI Platform team, partnering with Product and senior engineering leadership to plan, prioritize, and execute milestones.
• Participate in architecture and design reviews for AI API infrastructure, LLM call management, streaming, history storage, and cost tracking systems.
• Provide technical guidance and review for the Agent framework, with a focus on security, scalability, and reliability – including agent execution data and cost telemetry.
• Perform code reviews and uphold high engineering quality standards across the full stack.
• Stay technically engaged with the codebase, contributing code where appropriate to unblock the team or lead by example.
• Identify and mitigate technical risks and drive resolution of production incidents in partnership with your team.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with downstream product teams who consume the AI APIs, understanding their needs, and translating them into clear technical requirements for your team.
• Collaborate with security, infrastructure, and data teams to ensure the Agent framework and LLM infrastructure meet enterprise-grade standards.
• Communicate progress, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Contribute to the broader engineering culture at SmartBear through participation in cross-team initiatives, engineering standards, and knowledge sharing.

Skills Required

Management & Leadership

• 2–4 years of engineering management experience, with a track record of leading teams that have shipped production software.
• Demonstrated ability to coach and develop engineers at varying levels, including navigating performance conversations and building growth plans.
• Experience hiring engineers, including sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to tailor technical discussions to both engineering audiences and business stakeholders.

Technical Skills

• Hands-on background as a software engineer with prior experience writing and shipping production code; comfortable reading code, contributing to reviews, and engaging deeply in architecture discussions.
• Proficiency in TypeScript and/or Python
• Understanding LLM-based architectures and AI/Agent-based systems (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, or comparable frameworks); hands-on experience is a strong plus.
• Familiarity with API design and management, including RESTful services and modern API concepts such as MCP (Model Context Protocol).
• Experience with cloud infrastructure on AWS and containerized deployments using Docker; able to reason for scalability and reliability tradeoffs.
• Understanding security principles as they apply to AI systems, including secure credential management, access control, and data handling for multi-tenant environments.
• Familiarity with observability practices: logging, monitoring, alerting, and cost tracking in production of AI systems.
• Experience with NoSQL or vector databases is a plus.

Ways of Working

• Able to operate with ambiguity, define structure, and drive clarity for the team when requirements are evolving.
• Data-informed mindset – measures outcomes, iterates on processes, and uses metrics to guide both engineering and team health decisions.
• Comfortable balancing competing priorities across people, product delivery, and technical quality simultaneously.
• Collaborative and low-ego; builds trust quickly with peers, reports, and senior leadership alike.

Why you should join the SmartBear crew:

• You can grow your career at every level.
• We invest in your success as well as the spaces where our teams come together to work, collaborate, and have fun.
• We love celebrating our SmartBears; we even encourage our crew to take their birthdays off.
• We are guided by a People and Culture organization - an important distinction for us. We think about our team holistically – the whole person.
• We celebrate our differences in experiences, viewpoints, and identities because we know it leads to better outcomes.

Did you know:

• Our main goal at SmartBear is to make our technology-driven world a better place.
• SmartBear is committed to ethical corporate practices and social responsibility, promoting good in all the communities we serve.
• SmartBear is headquartered in Somerville, MA with offices across the world including Galway Ireland, Bath, UK, Wroclaw, Poland, Ahmedabad and Bangalore India.
• We've won major industry (product and company) awards including B2B Innovators Award, Content Marketing Association, IntellyX Digital Innovator and Built-in Best Places to Work.

SmartBear is committed to creating an inclusive workplace for employees where all individuals are treated with respect and dignity. We are an equal opportunity employer and make employment decisions based on merit, qualifications, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, gender, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, or any other protected status under applicable laws. We are dedicated to fostering a workplace that reflects a diversity of thought and experience as well as our values of being smart, open, driven, accountable, and curious.

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