Engineering Manager, Applied AI

The role

You will manage a group of engineers across client engagements and provide technical leadership. You will review architecture, agent, prompt, and eval design while running engagement-level relationships with clients.

What you will do

• Manage engineers up to senior and give direct, actionable feedback
• Coach on execution and help engineers step up toward tech lead
• Review architecture, agent, prompt, and eval design
• Step into hard technical and client situations
• Run engagement-level relationships with clients and stakeholders
• Manage transitions on the team and plan ahead
• Interview, calibrate, close, and onboard new engineers
• Follow team practices and bring patterns to the wider team

Required qualifications

• 3+ years managing engineers
• 5+ years in software engineering
• Hands-on with Python
• Experience delivering software in real client environments
• 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
• experience taking a team or practice from zero to one

Benefits

• 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%
• 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 covering staffing, feedback, technical review, and closing the loop

About the company

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