Manager, SW Engineering

Zuora • Foster City, CA

8d • $197,200 - $271,150

About The Position

Zuora is hiring a Manager, Software Engineering for its AI Platform team to lead development of the agentic platform powering Zuora AI. The platform includes shared runtime, orchestration, tooling, context, and safety layers used by Zuora AI agents and experiences. The manager will set technical direction for how agents work with live account, contract, invoice, payment, and accounting data; act safely through tools and protocols such as MCP; and are evaluated, observed, and governed for use in financial workflows.

This is a hands-on leadership role, with at least 50% of time spent writing, reviewing, and shipping code. The manager will hire and grow a team of 5 to 8 engineers while maintaining a weekly release cadence and high standards for quality and safety. They will partner with Product and application engineering teams to turn emerging AI capabilities into reliable, enterprise-grade software. Within 6 to 12 months, the goal is to ship a platform that enables Zuora teams to launch agents quickly and confidently, establish standards for AI quality, security, and auditability, and build a team recognized for shipping.

The AI Platform team is part of Product & Technology and builds the foundation for agents, MCP capabilities, and AI experiences embedded across Zuora’s quote-to-cash platform. The team works across time zones, favors written and asynchronous collaboration, and makes decisions close to the work.

Requirements

• Typically 2 or more years of experience as a people manager or tech lead in B2B SaaS, with a strong hands-on engineering background.
• Currently writes production code and is willing to spend at least half of the role coding.
• Experience building and shipping production systems powered by LLMs, such as agents, tool-calling or RAG systems, or LLM evaluation and observability tooling.
• Experience designing distributed, cloud-native platforms or services used by other engineering teams.
• Strong coaching skills and ability to set clear expectations and make sound technical and delivery decisions in a fast-evolving technology space.
• Experience working on teams that ship weekly or faster while maintaining quality through small releases, automated testing, and fast feedback loops.
• Ability to balance long-term architecture with near-term delivery as priorities evolve.
• Track record of delivering complex software on time, improving team velocity or quality, and developing engineers into senior roles.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with billing, subscription, pricing, or quote-to-cash systems.
• Experience with agent frameworks and protocols such as Model Context Protocol, multi-agent orchestration, or model gateway and routing layers.
• Experience applying AI in regulated or high-trust domains such as finance, where accuracy, explainability, and auditability matter.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms such as AWS and modern service architecture.
• Experience partnering with Product on roadmap and discovery.

Responsibilities

• Spend at least 50% of working time writing, reviewing, and shipping code; design and build core platform components and personally own critical system components.
• Own the architecture and roadmap for Zuora’s agentic platform, including agent runtime and orchestration, tool and MCP integration, memory and context retrieval, and model access across providers.
• Build evaluation, observability, and guardrail foundations, including testing harnesses, tracing, cost and latency controls, permissions, and audit trails.
• Provide clear APIs, SDKs, and patterns so product teams can build agents for billing, collections, revenue, and implementation workflows.
• Run a weekly release cadence using small, shippable increments supported by CI/CD, automated testing, and evaluation gates.
• Hire, coach, and grow engineers; set clear expectations; and foster ownership, rigor, and fast iteration.
• Partner with Product, Security, and Architecture to balance innovation with reliability, compliance, and customer trust.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, variable bonus and performance-based reward opportunities, and retirement programs.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Generous, flexible time off, paid holidays, wellness days, and a company-wide year-end break.
• Paid parental leave, including fully paid leave for eligible employees, subject to local policy.
• Learning and development stipend.
• Opportunities to volunteer and give back, including charitable donation matching where available.
• Mental wellbeing resources and support.

What This Job Offers

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