Senior Engineering Manager, Applied AI

The role

You will manage engineers and managers, provide technical leadership, and handle staffing and hiring. You will work on client engagements to build and run production AI systems.

What you will do

• Manage a team and grow engineers through actionable feedback
• Review architecture, agent prompts, structure, and eval design
• Handle hard technical and client situations like production regressions
• Turn patterns across engagements into standing practice and platform capabilities
• Shape staffing for engagements and plan transitions
• Run hiring from sourcing to onboarding
• Work with product, client partners, and client stakeholders

Required qualifications

• 4+ years managing engineers and managers, including senior and staff
• 8+ years in software engineering
• Hands-on with Python
• Experience delivering software in real client environments
• Experience taking something from zero to one
• Curious about agents, evals, and multi-agent systems
• Fluent with AI coding tools

Nice to have

• Management experience in a consulting, services, or forward deployed engineering organization

Benefits

• Base salary of $300,000 USD, plus 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
• Optional 4-week ramp-up at 50% for parental leave
• Loft office in Soho with lunch and snacks

Before you apply

• Initial screen with recruiting partner
• Technical screen with a short, real-world coding exercise
• Hiring manager interview
• Technical interviews covering coding and systems design
• Case study live scenario-based discussion

About the company

Headstart is built for people who want to think like founders. They work inside enterprises to ship production AI systems and are building their own platform to deliver agentic systems.