Engineering Manager AI

DEUNA • San Francisco, CA

7d • Remote

About The Position

DEUNA is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead their AI/ML engineering team. This team is responsible for building intelligent systems for payment routing optimization, authorization rate improvement, and AI-powered digital workforce products. The role involves managing a team of approximately 7-8 engineers across ML, backend, and platform work. While not a day-to-day coding role, it requires sufficient technical depth in ML systems, backend services, and AI/LLM workflows to guide architecture, support the team, and represent the team's roadmap. The position emphasizes hands-on management, focusing on delivery, scoping, costing, sequencing initiatives, and fostering a culture of low tech debt and high quality.

Requirements

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 2-3+ years in a people management role leading engineers.
• Significant experience building and shipping backend and/or ML systems at scale, ideally with exposure to fintech, payments, or another regulated, latency-sensitive domain.
• Managed engineers before, hiring, developing, and retaining a team, and know how to balance people development with delivery pressure.
• Hands-on familiarity with modern AI/ML systems: model training and serving, LLM-powered workflows (agents, RAG, orchestration), or similar — enough to have a real technical conversation with your team and challenge their thinking when needed.
• Practical exposure to LLM-based systems in production (agents, RAG, or AI workflow orchestration).
• Communicate clearly and proactively, both with your team and with cross-functional partners in product and operations.
• Comfortable in a fast-moving startup environment — priorities shift, and you can re-scope and re-communicate without losing the team's trust.
• Driven by self-improvement and push the people around you to grow as well.

Nice To Haves

• Payments, fintech, or another regulated-industry background is a strong plus, but not required.

Responsibilities

• Manage and grow a team of AI/ML and platform engineers, including hiring, performance development, and career growth.
• Coach engineers through technical design decisions, code and architecture reviews, and hard trade-offs.
• Set the engineering bar for the team: code standards, testing strategy, and CI/CD practices.
• Drive accurate costing and delivery estimates for initiatives, and keep the team accountable to commitments.
• Guide architecture for ML model lifecycle work (training, evaluation, monitoring, retraining) and LLM-powered workflows (agent orchestration, RAG pipelines, vector DB integrations).
• Oversee inference services supporting live payment routing, ensuring they meet strict latency and reliability requirements.
• Ensure the team's AWS infrastructure, CI/CD, and observability practices (dashboards, tracing, on-call runbooks) meet a high bar.
• Apply sound judgment on PCI-DSS and data-handling requirements across anything touching payment data.
• Translate product vision into an executable technical roadmap with clear timelines and trade-offs.
• Partner directly with product, operations, and modeling leadership to keep feedback loops short and priorities aligned.
• Represent the AI/ML engineering team's progress and blockers to leadership.

Benefits

• Vacations and additional PTO
• Remote work from anywhere
• Economic support for health insurance, internet and cell phone line
• Stock options
• Learning and development platform

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed