Senior Manager, Engineering

Ontra • Concord, CA

9d • $259,000 - $324,000 • 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 developing strong, resilient engineering teams. The team provides Ontra engineers with a fast, safe, and measurable way to build AI-powered products. Its remit includes Ontra’s search stack for customer documents and entity data, 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 taking agents from concept to deployed and evaluated systems. This work is core to Ontra’s long-term product strategy.

The role combines technical architecture, people leadership, and cross-functional execution. The Senior Manager will lead a team of AI engineers, remain hands-on in designing solutions, and help shape engineering culture as the team grows. The position is currently open only to candidates based in New York and requires working on-site 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

• 8+ years of experience as an individual contributor.
• 3+ years of technical leadership in a high-growth, scaling company managing senior engineers.
• History of building or leading an ML, AI, or developer platform used by other teams, with clear 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 such as AWS, Kubernetes, and SageMaker or similar, and CI/CD.
• Sound approach to security and data privacy.
• Strong communication skills, an empathetic approach to teamwork, and 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 isolation of agent execution.
• Ability to distinguish durable technical foundations from hype and make evidence-based build-versus-buy decisions as the model landscape changes.

Responsibilities

• Set priorities and own the roadmap across search, LLM routing, evaluation, and agent infrastructure; make build, adopt, or buy decisions and track platform adoption, cost, and latency.
• Lead Ontra’s search and retrieval stack, including indexing, retrieval, relevance, and search quality.
• Establish shared quality evaluation practices for search and AI, including datasets, LLM-as-judge, CI regression gates, and online evaluations.
• Set standards for tenant isolation, security reviews, incident response, and multi-provider failover across search and model access.
• Shape the shared platform for building, versioning, running, and auditing agents and skills.
• Partner with Product, Architecture, Security, DevOps, and domain experts to deliver customer solutions that support long-term business objectives.
• Hire, coach, and develop engineers, fostering 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