Senior Manager, Engineering

Ontra • Concord, CA

10d • Hybrid

About The Position

Ontra is seeking a Senior Manager, Engineering focused on Search and AI Foundations, reporting to the VP of Product Engineering. This strategic and hands-on role owns delivery of high-impact search and AI platform initiatives while growing strong, resilient engineering teams. The team provides Ontra engineers with a fast, safe, and measurable way to build AI-powered products. It owns Ontra’s search stack, including semantic and AI-powered search over customer documents and entity data, and the AI platform: LLM access and routing across commercial and open-weight models, the evaluation platform, LLM observability, ML service infrastructure, data anonymization, and an agent platform for developing, evaluating, and deploying agents.

The role combines technical architecture, people leadership, and cross-functional execution. The Senior Manager will lead a team of AI engineers, own platform strategy and delivery, and help shape engineering culture. The position is currently limited to candidates based in New York and requires on-site work at the New York office three days per week. Occasional travel is required, typically at least twice per year for team and larger group offsites.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of individual-contributor experience and at least 3 years of technical leadership experience in a high-growth, scaling company managing senior engineers.
• A track record of building or leading an ML, AI, or developer platform used by other teams, with demonstrable adoption and impact.
• Hands-on production experience with search and LLM applications, including areas such as indexing and relevance, model gateways, prompt management, evaluation, and tracing.
• Experience with Python, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and sound security and data-privacy practices.
• Great communication skills, an empathetic approach to teamwork, and the ability to prioritize in a high-performance development environment.
• Must be based in New York and work on-site at the New York office three days per week.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with agent frameworks and runtimes, tool use and MCP, workflow orchestration, and agent execution isolation.
• Experience with technologies such as OpenSearch, vector databases, Arize, MLflow, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, AWS, Kubernetes, and SageMaker or similar.
• Ability to distinguish durable foundations from hype and make evidence-based build-versus-buy decisions as the model landscape changes.

Responsibilities

• Set priorities across search, LLM routing, evaluation, and agent infrastructure; make build, adopt, or buy decisions and determine when to re-architect or hold a launch.
• Treat the platform as a product and track adoption, cost, and latency.
• Own the search stack behind Ontra’s AI search, including indexing, retrieval, relevance, and search quality.
• Drive a shared evaluation approach for search and AI, including datasets, LLM-as-judge, CI regression gates, and online evaluations.
• Set standards for tenant isolation, security review, incident response, and multi-provider failover across search and model access.
• Shape how Ontra builds, versions, runs, and audits agents and skills on a shared platform.
• Partner with Product, Architecture, Security, DevOps, and domain experts to deliver customer solutions that support long-term business objectives.
• Hire, coach, and develop engineers while building a high-performance team culture.

Benefits

• Twice-yearly team offsites for in-person collaboration.
• Paid flexible time off policy.
• Paid parental leave and benefits.
• Employer-supported retirement contributions, varying by country.
• Monthly phone and internet reimbursement.
• Company-sponsored learning and development resources, department budgets for professional development, and a robust onboarding program.
• Various options for medical, dental, and vision insurance.

What This Job Offers

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