Senior Engineering Manager, Applied AI

Genius AI • San Francisco, CA

2d • $240,000 - $300,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Genius AI is building technology that helps local businesses handle administrative work so practitioners can focus on their work and customers. Its products support tasks including booking, marketing, client management, finances, staff management, and inventory management.

The Applied AI team is a small group of forward-deployed builders that identifies work where AI can improve outcomes, builds solutions alongside the team responsible for that work, and hands off stable solutions to durable owners. The team focuses on applying AI across business functions, partnering with Engineering DevEx to explore new engineering workflows, and testing frontier models and agent platforms against real work.

The Senior Engineering Manager will be the team's first engineering manager and remain hands-on, including prototyping, pairing on agent architecture and evaluations, and building solutions directly. The role leads and grows a lean team, drives measurable business outcomes, develops AI evaluation practices, and helps teams adopt effective AI-enabled ways of working. The position requires commuting to Genius AI's New York City headquarters or San Francisco office. The company generally works in-office three to four days per week, with Tuesdays and Thursdays required.

Requirements

• Personally built and shipped agentic systems with real users within the last 12 months; able to explain the architecture, failures, costs, and how success was measured.
• Able to describe and assess meaningful metrics for whether a team is using AI effectively, including the limitations of those metrics.
• At least 7 years of software engineering experience.
• At least 2 years of engineering management experience.
• Experience managing engineers while remaining hands-on in the code on a small team.
• Experience working within a Sales, Marketing, or Operations team's workflow and helping the team adopt something new.
• Ability to connect engineering work to business outcomes such as pipeline, revenue, time saved, or cost avoided, and report results clearly.
• Comfortable creating processes where needed and keeping them proportional to the team's needs.
• Must be commutable to the New York City headquarters or San Francisco office and able to attend in person three to four days per week, including Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Responsibilities

• Manage and grow a lean team of engineers while setting the standard for an AI-native engineering team.
• Remain hands-on through prototyping, pairing on agent architecture and evaluations, and building solutions when that is the fastest approach.
• Drive go-to-market outcomes such as outbound replies, demos, closed-won deals, and top-of-funnel leads, with an agreed metric and executive-trusted readout for each engagement.
• Run a structured engagement process involving intake, one-week sprints with Friday demos, and a clean handoff to a partner team and durable owner.
• Help establish best-in-class evaluation practices and share learnings so AI product teams can set measurable quality standards and move quickly and safely.
• Select appropriate models, starting with frontier models for new use cases and considering cheaper or open-weight models as use cases mature.
• Partner with DevEx on experiments that change engineering workflows and turn successful approaches into shared standards, documentation, and talks.
• Work with leaders across Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance, Legal, and People to identify high-leverage opportunities and maintain a stack-ranked backlog aligned with company priorities.
• Build solutions with Sales, Marketing, and Operations teams, and hand off stable work so the Applied AI team can move on to new problems.

What This Job Offers

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