AI Senior Engineering Manager

Ciklum; Pune District, Chennai, Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,500,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Ciklum in Pune, India, seeks a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a greenfield AI agent platform. You will own technical direction, team growth, and delivery for a 10–15 engineer group operating at the intersection of LLMs, orchestration, and production infra.

You will balance hands-on architecture with people management, drive hiring and mentorship, and report on velocity, system performance, and risk to leadership.

Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years managing engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of AI & Forward Deployed Engineers building agent orchestration, tool-use frameworks, and evaluation pipelines from zero
• Set technical strategy for agent architecture: planning loops, memory, tool calling, multi-agent coordination, and guardrails
• Drive the implementation of an AIDLC (AI-Driven Development Lifecycle) approach, replacing traditional PDLC/SDLC practices across the org
• Own the Observability and Evals strategy for agentic systems — tracing, monitoring, and eval frameworks for non-deterministic, multi-step workflows
• Partner with product managers to translate ambiguous problems into shippable agentic features
• Own reliability and safety practices for autonomous systems (evals, sandboxing, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, rollback strategies)
• Drive hiring, mentorship, and career growth for your team
• Balance hands-on technical involvement (architecture reviews, code reviews) with people management
• Report on team velocity, system performance, and risk to leadership
• Sketch out engineering estimations

Skills

Team leadership

Software engineering

AI systems

Cloud architecture

Observability & MLOps

Communication

Hiring & mentorship

Architecture reviews

Python

FastAPI

Education

Bachelor's in CS or related field

MS preferred

Tools

LangGraph

AutoGen

Step Functions

Bedrock AgentCore

Python

Job description

Senior Engineering Manager to lead a greenfield build of our agentic AI systems — autonomous, multi-step workflows where AI agents plan, use tools, and act with minimal human intervention. You'll own technical direction, team growth, and delivery for a group of 10–15 engineers working at the intersection of LLMs, orchestration, and production infrastructure, building this platform from the ground up.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow a team of AI & Forward Deployed Engineers building agent orchestration, tool-use frameworks, and evaluation pipelines from zero

• Set technical strategy for agent architecture: planning loops, memory, tool calling, multi-agent coordination, and guardrails

• Drive the implementation of an AIDLC (AI-Driven Development Lifecycle) approach, replacing traditional PDLC/SDLC practices across the org

• Own the Observability and Evals strategy for agentic systems — tracing, monitoring, and eval frameworks for non-deterministic, multi-step workflows

• Partner with product managers to translate ambiguous problems into shippable agentic features

• Own reliability and safety practices for autonomous systems (evals, sandboxing, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, rollback strategies)

• Drive hiring, mentorship, and career growth for your team

• Balance hands-on technical involvement (architecture reviews, code reviews) with people management

• Report on team velocity, system performance, and risk to leadership

• Sketch out engineering estimations

What We're Looking For

• 12+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years managing engineering teams

• Direct experience building or operating LLM-powered systems (agents, RAG, tool-calling, orchestration frameworks like LangGraph, AutoGen, or custom stacks)

• Proven track record of delivering an AIDLC implementation that successfully replaced PDLC/SDLC within an engineering organisation

• Cloud: AWS — excellent knowledge with Bedrock AgentCore, Step Functions (ASL), and related agent-hosting/orchestration services

• Strong knowledge of Harness engineering

• Strong experience with Observability and Evals for non-deterministic systems (tracing, eval harnesses, monitoring, drift/regression detection)

• Backend services: experience with Python and FastAPI

• Frontend: working knowledge of React, Tailwind, and Solstice (JLL design system)

• Track record of shipping ambiguous, fast-moving products under real constraints

• Excellent communicator who can translate technical tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders