Sr. Engineering Manager, AI Platform

Illumio • Sunnyvale, CA

1d • $233,000 - $280,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Illumio is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager for its AI Platform team at the Sunnyvale, California headquarters. The role leads and grows backend engineering teams building scalable cloud services and AI-powered platform capabilities. It drives technical strategy and execution for distributed systems, platform APIs, AI-enabled services, and large-scale cloud-native architectures, while helping shape Illumio’s AI roadmap. The manager partners with Product, Security, Infrastructure, and Data Science, guides planning and staffing, and supports reliable service delivery across AWS, Azure, and GCP. The position is onsite five days a week.

Requirements

• At least 10 years building distributed and scalable backend systems.
• At least 3 years leading software engineering teams and engineering leads or managers.
• Strong experience in Java, Go, Python, or equivalent backend technologies.
• Deep expertise with microservices, APIs, cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, and containerized workloads.
• Experience building high-scale distributed systems and event-driven architectures using technologies such as Kafka.
• Practical understanding of modern AI systems, including LLMs, AI agents, RAG architectures, model serving, prompt engineering, and agent orchestration frameworks.
• Experience partnering with Product Management to define strategy and deliver customer-facing capabilities.
• Strong communication skills and ability to influence technical direction across organizations.
• Experience operating production services with a focus on telemetry, monitoring, and reliability.

Nice To Haves

• Experience leading AI Platform, ML Infrastructure, or Agentic Systems teams.
• Hands-on knowledge of vector databases, inference optimization, model evaluation frameworks, and AI observability platforms such as Langfuse.
• Security or cybersecurity domain experience.
• Experience building enterprise SaaS platforms at scale.
• Familiarity with Terraform, cloud automation, and Infrastructure-as-Code.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of backend engineers building scalable cloud services and AI-powered platform capabilities.
• Drive technical strategy and execution for distributed systems, platform APIs, and AI-enabled services.
• Partner with Product, Security, Infrastructure, and Data Science teams to deliver intelligent platform experiences.
• Define architecture for large-scale microservices, event-driven systems, and cloud-native applications.
• Help shape Illumio’s AI roadmap, including agentic workflows, LLM integrations, RAG architectures, and AI infrastructure.
• Establish engineering best practices for reliability, observability, scalability, security, and operational excellence.
• Mentor engineering managers and senior engineers, fostering a culture of ownership and innovation.
• Drive quarterly planning, staffing strategy, technical roadmaps, and architectural reviews.
• Ensure successful delivery of highly available services running across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments.

What This Job Offers

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