Senior Engineering Manager, Quality & Annotations

Handshake•San Francisco, CA

4d•$240,000 - $280,000•Onsite

About The Position

We're hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to own two of HAI's core engineering teams, Quality and Annotations, leading a combined org of ~15 engineers. This role sits at a rare intersection: one team pushes the frontier of AI quality and evaluation tooling, while the other builds the extensible platform infrastructure that operators and fellows rely on every day. Lead quality engineering systems that directly improve AI output reliability, evaluation accuracy, and benchmark performance for frontier lab partners. Own the annotations platform: operator workflows, tasking flows, and pipeline infrastructure that powers data delivery. Build and scale an organization across two distinct technical domains, developing senior ICs and driving cross-team technical strategy. Partner with internal stakeholders to prioritize platform investments that unlock other teams to move faster and build on top of shared infrastructure.

Requirements

7+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years managing engineering teams of 8 or more and experience manager managers.
Background at companies where AI is the core product; you've shipped in environments where model quality, data pipelines, and evaluation rigor are table stakes
Strong product engineering instincts; you can lead teams building complex user-facing systems, not just backend infrastructure
Experience leading teams with meaningfully different technical focuses simultaneously
Track record of developing engineers; you've grown senior ICs, EMs, and leads, not just delivered projects
Strong prioritization and stakeholder management
Clear, direct communicator who can translate between technical complexity and business context
3+ years managing teams, plus 5+ years hands-on engineering experience
Experience leading senior engineers
Proven ability to align cross-functionally and deliver in fast-moving, unclear problem spaces
Strong platform/distributed systems background, and the ability to turn needs into a clear roadmap, ship iteratively, and measure outcomes

Nice To Haves

Experience managing managers
Managing an EM (or equivalent scope) is a plus
Familiarity with LLM evaluation, quality pipelines, or applied AI tooling
Experience with annotation or data labeling platforms, tasking systems, or workflow orchestration

Responsibilities

Lead quality engineering systems that directly improve AI output reliability, evaluation accuracy, and benchmark performance for frontier lab partners
Own the annotations platform: operator workflows, tasking flows, and pipeline infrastructure that powers data delivery
Build and scale an organization across two distinct technical domains, developing senior ICs and driving cross-team technical strategy
Partner with internal stakeholders to prioritize platform investments that unlock other teams to move faster and build on top of shared infrastructure