Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Headstart AI builds production AI systems for enterprise clients and develops agentic platforms. The Engineering Manager, Applied AI will manage and coach engineers while remaining hands-on in client engagements, providing technical leadership, overseeing delivery and staffing, and supporting hiring and practice development.
Responsibilities
- Your engineers. Manage engineers up to senior, hold a high bar, and give direct, actionable feedback. Coach on execution and help strong engineers step up toward tech lead
- Technical leadership. Review architecture, agent, prompt, and eval design on your engagements. Step into hard technical and client situations, like production regressions and unclear requirements, and make the call. Raise trouble early, while it's cheap to fix
- Engagement delivery. Run the engagement-level relationship with clients and their stakeholders, alongside product and client partners, so each engagement lands
- Staffing. Manage transitions on your team, plan ahead, and flag risks before they reach a client. Escalate conflicts across engagements to the Head of Engineering
- Hiring. Interview, calibrate, close, and onboard new engineers against the bar the Head of Engineering sets
- Practice. Follow the team's practices and tell us what isn't working. Bring patterns you see to the wider team so they can become standing practice, and make sure your engineers use what exists
Skills
- 3+ years managing engineers, with real experience giving feedback and developing people
- 5+ years in software engineering, deep enough to review designs and challenge the team's approach
- Hands-on with Python
- Experience delivering software in real client environments
- Curious about agents, evals, and multi-agent systems, with a sense of where they're reliable and where a person needs to take the wheel
- Fluent with AI coding tools
- Management experience in a consulting, services, or forward deployed engineering organization, or experience taking a team or practice from zero to one
Benefits
- Competitive equity
- 401k with 4.5% employer match
- Fully covered medical, dental, and vision premiums
- Monthly wellness stipend
- Citi Bike
- Pre-tax commuter benefits
- 12 weeks parental leave, with an optional 4-week ramp-up at 50%
- Loft office in Soho with lunch and snacks
- Hybrid in NYC
- Fully remote work option for candidates in the US or Canada
Company Overview