Senior Manager, AI Engineering (AI Enablement Platform)

ABC Fitness is building a shared AI Enablement Platform designed to empower every product team to ship AI-powered features—quickly, safely, and at scale. 

The goal of this platform is simple: remove the plumbing. We want our product engineers focused on AI innovation, not on reinventing the underlying infrastructure. This platform provides the "paved path" for AI, including: 

• Reusable APIs: Chat, RAG, and classification. 

• Agent Orchestration Patterns: Standardized ways to handle multi-step reasoning. 

• Evaluation & Validation Systems: Tools to measure model performance and quality. 

• Production Guardrails: Built-in observability, policy enforcement, and cost controls. 

As the Engineering Manager, you will lead the core team (including our Principal AI Engineers) responsible for building and scaling this platform. You will treat the platform as a product, ensuring it is not only powerful but also intuitive and widely adopted by the broader engineering organization. 

What You’ll Do 

• Lead the AI Enablement Team: Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of engineers working on cutting-edge AI capabilities. 

• Platform-as-a-Product: Own the roadmap for our shared AI services. Ensure the platform is well-documented, easy to integrate, and solves the actual friction points our product teams face. 

• Deliver Reusable Capabilities: Oversee the development of core APIs, SDKs, and evaluation systems that provide a consistent "AI Way" of building at ABC. 

• Drive Organizational Adoption: You are the chief advocate for the platform. You’ll identify friction in the developer experience and ensure that the platform becomes the default, non-negotiable path for all AI development. 

• Guide technical decision-making: Partner with Principal AI Engineers and senior ICs to shape architecture, review trade-offs, and ensure the team makes strong decisions around evaluation, observability, reliability, security, scalability, and cost. 

• Establish Standards: Define the "ABC Best Practices" for how AI systems are built, tested, and monitored in production. 

• Focus on DevEx (Developer Experience): Minimize the "time to first token" for new teams starting their AI journey. 

• Build and grow the team: Create a motivated, high-performing AI engineering team by understanding each engineer’s strengths, aspirations, and growth areas; running effective 1:1s; giving timely feedback; and creating development plans that help engineers grow in scope, judgment, and ownership. 

• Create the team operating system: Establish planning, prioritization, retrospectives, delivery metrics, decision logs, communication rhythms, and lightweight processes that help the team deliver predictably and sustainably. 

• Develop leaders within the team: Delegate meaningful ownership, create stretch opportunities, and help engineers lead technical discovery, design reviews, rollouts, retrospectives, and cross-team initiatives. 

• Drive cross-team alignment: Build strong relationships with Product, Data, SRE, Security, and engineering teams consuming the platform; use feedback loops to ensure the platform solves real developer friction and becomes the trusted path for AI development at ABC. 

What This Is Not 

• Not a shared services "ticket queue" taking requests for one-off features. 

• Not an isolated research or experimentation lab—we build for production. 

• Not building siloed solutions; we build tools that scale for the entire company. 

What You Bring 

• Engineering Leadership: You’ve successfully led platform or backend teams delivering complex, internal systems at scale. 

• Technical judgment: You can guide architecture and engineering trade-offs without needing to be the deepest expert in every detail. You know when to challenge, when to delegate, when to escalate, and when to let the team own the decision. 

• Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep understanding of scalable APIs, microservices, and how to maintain high availability for shared services. 

• Execution & Delivery Focus: You know how to balance long-term architectural health with the need to ship usable capabilities to your internal customers today. 

• Influence & Alignment: You can drive consensus across multiple product lines and ensure everyone is moving toward a unified AI vision. 

• People leadership depth: You have experience motivating engineers, running effective 1:1s, giving actionable feedback, managing performance, and helping engineers grow through clear development plans and stretch opportunities. 

• Systems thinking for teams: You know how to create the rituals, metrics, communication loops, and decision-making structures that help teams succeed without relying on heroics. 

• Coaching mindset: You develop engineers by asking good questions, creating clarity, and building ownership rather than micromanaging or taking over. 

Bonus Points: 

• Experience building or managing internal developer platforms or specialized AI/LLM-Ops tooling. 

• Familiarity with modern AI evaluation frameworks and observability tools (e.g., Langfuse). 

• Experience moving an organization from "experimental AI" to "production-grade AI." 

What Success Looks Like 

• Adoption: Product teams rely on the platform as their default starting point for any AI feature. 

• Velocity: Teams ship AI-powered products in days because they didn't have to build the infrastructure themselves. 

• Consistency: Every AI feature at ABC follows the same high standards for safety, observability, and cost management. 

• Reliability: The Enablement Platform is seen as a bedrock of stability for the entire R&D organization. 

• Technical Judgment: The team consistently makes strong architectural decisions with the right balance of speed, reliability, quality, and cost. 

• Operating Rhythm: The team has clear planning, execution, decision-making, and communication systems that reduce ambiguity and improve delivery. 

• Engineer Growth: Each team member has a clear growth path, regular feedback, and opportunities to increase ownership and technical judgment. 

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU:  

• Purpose led company with a Values focused culture – Best Life, One Team, Growth Mindset 

• Time Off – with our open PTO policy, you pick when you want time off when it’s best for you! 

• Days of Disconnect – once a quarter, we take a collective breather and enjoy a day off together around the globe. #oneteam 

• Parental & Pawternity Leave – we offer leave for when your family grows by two feet or four paws! 

• Fitness Perk – we are committed to meeting you wherever you are in your fitness journey with a quarterly reimbursement. 

• Discounts – access to discounts with our partners, such as Dell, Microsoft & many more. 

• Medical/Dental/Vision coverage. 

• EAP – we get you help when you need it. Period. 

• Calm App +4 – enjoy tranquility with a Calm App subscription for you and up to 4 dependents over the age of 16. 

• And more! – so many benefits we couldn’t even fit them all here! 

Why This Matters 

This platform is the foundation of the new AI-native ABC Fitness. If you get this right, you enable every engineer in the company to become an AI engineer, unlocking an unprecedented level of innovation and customer value.