Senior Manager, Engineering

For this job, we are currently only hiring candidates based in New York and require on-site work at our New York office three days per week. For more information on where we employ, please see below.

About the Role

Ontra is seeking a Senior Manager, Engineering, focused on Search and AI Foundations, reporting to the VP of Product Engineering.

This role is both strategic and hands-on, owning delivery of high-impact search and AI platform initiatives while growing strong, resilient engineering teams.

As the Senior Engineering Manager for Search and AI Foundations, you will lead the team that gives every Ontra engineer a fast, safe, and measurable way to build AI-powered products. The team owns Ontra’s search stack, including semantic and AI-powered search over customer documents and entity data, alongside the AI platform: LLM access and routing across commercial and open-weight models, the evaluation platform, LLM observability, ML service infrastructure, data anonymization, and the agent platform that takes teams from agent idea to a deployed, evaluated agent.

This work is core to Ontra’s long-term product strategy.

This is a critical leadership role for someone who thrives at the intersection of technical architecture, people leadership, and cross-functional execution.

The role is a great opportunity for someone who enjoys being hands-on while leading a team of AI engineers. If you are interested in not only designing solutions but also shaping the engineering culture for a growing team, this role would be a great fit.

If you have a proven track record of building platforms other teams depend on, developing high-performance teams and systems, and you thrive in a highly collaborative environment, we’d love to get to know you!

What You’ll Do

• Own the roadmap: Set priorities across search, LLM routing, evaluation, and agent infrastructure. Decide when to re-architect, when to hold a launch, and what to build, adopt, or buy. Treat the platform as a product and track adoption, cost, and latency

• Lead search and retrieval: Own the search stack behind Ontra’s AI search, including indexing, retrieval, relevance, and search quality

• Make AI quality measurable: Drive a shared evaluation approach for search and AI (datasets, LLM-as-judge, CI regression gates, online evals) so teams can ship changes with confidence

• Own security and reliability: Set the bar for tenant isolation, security review, incident response, and multi-provider failover across search and model access

• Lead agent infrastructure: Shape how Ontra builds, versions, runs, and audits agents and skills on one shared platform

• Collaborate: Partner with Product, Architecture, Security, DevOps, and domain experts to rapidly deliver solutions to our customers that also serve our long-term business objectives

• Inspire: Hire, coach, and grow engineers, and lead the team to embrace a high-performance culture where we all aspire to greatness

What You’ll Bring

• Experience: 8+ years of experience as an individual contributor and 3+ years of technical leadership in a high-growth, scaling company managing senior engineers

• Platform track record: A history of building or leading an ML, AI, or developer platform that other teams depend on, with clear adoption and impact

• LLM and ML systems depth: Hands-on experience with search and LLM applications in production, such as indexing and relevance (e.g., OpenSearch, vector databases), model gateways, prompt management, evaluation, and tracing (e.g., Arize, MLflow, OpenTelemetry, Datadog)

• Engineering foundation: Python, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes, SageMaker or similar), CI/CD, and a sound approach to security and data privacy

• Agentic systems (preferred): Experience with agent frameworks and runtimes, tool use and MCP, workflow orchestration, and isolation of agent execution

• Judgment: Ability to separate durable foundations from hype and make build-vs-buy calls with evidence as the model landscape shifts

• Soft skills: Great communication skills, an empathetic approach to teamwork, and the ability to prioritize tasks in a high-performance development environment

APAC

Hong Kong

EMEA

United Kingdom

Benefits Snapshot

• Twice yearly team offsites for in-person collaboration

• Paid flexible time off policy

• Paid parental leave and benefits

• Employer-supported retirement contributions, varying by country

• Monthly phone and internet reimbursement

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