Engineering Manager, AI

Relevance AI; United States; Hybrid; USD 127,000 - 162,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

ESOP – Employee Stock Ownership Plan

AI Productivity Benefit

Parental Leave

Milestone Merch

Food, Drinks & Community

Quarterly Team Events

Social Clubs

Sonder EAP

Job summary

Relevance AI in Sydney, Australia, is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a small AI-native team building the next generation of enterprise AI agents. You’ll guide architecture, code quality, and delivery while staying hands-on enough to mentor and unblock the team.

You’ll partner with product, customer success, and founders, shaping roadmap, optimizing for outcomes, and coaching 4–8 engineers. Experience in distributed systems, backend services, and AI tooling is valued; you’ll contribute to

Qualifications

• Experience leading AI-native engineering teams with 4–8 engineers.
• Strong product thinking and customer outcomes focus.
• Proven track record in hiring and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead a high-performing AI-native engineering team delivering enterprise AI agents.
• Set technical direction, review designs, ensure code quality and reliability.
• Collaborate with product, customers and founders to achieve outcomes.
• Mentor engineers and drive hiring and performance.

Skills

AI-native engineering

People leadership

Product thinking

Hiring excellence

Technical credibility

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Backend: Node.js/Express

Frontend: React

Databases: PostgreSQL

Cloud: AWS

Kubernetes

AI tooling: Claude Code

Job description

Location : Sydney, AU, Hybrid (3 days in office required)

About Us

At Relevance AI, we’re building the home of the AI workforce.

Our mission is simple: empower every team to delegate meaningful work to AI agents that think, act, and collaborate like experts.

With Relevance AI, anyone can create and manage intelligent agents that handle workflows, decisions, and collaboration - all within one unified platform. Our technology already powers industry leaders such as Canva, Databricks, Confluent, Autodesk, Lightspeed, Rakuten, Aveva, Qualified, and Activision Blizzard, helping them scale excellence across operations, marketing, and sales.

We’re backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Insight Partners, Peak XV, and King River Capital, and raised our Series B in April 2025 to accelerate growth and push the boundaries of agentic automation.

Headquartered in San Francisco and Sydney, we operate on a hybrid model and thrive on curiosity, collaboration, and execution - we move fast, think big, and win together.

In 2025, we were proud to be named LinkedIn’s #1 Startup in Australia.

If you want to define how the world works with AI, join us.

The Role

The greatest engineers today aren't just writing code faster—they're spending more time solving problems and building products that couldn't have existed a year ago.

Our team works at the frontier of AI-native development where curiosity, product thinking, rapid experimentation and judgement are embedded in our ways of working.

As an Engineering Manager, you'll lead a team of engineers working on some of the hardest problems in AI—helping shape how AI agents are built, orchestrated, and operated in production on our Enterprise platform. You'll report to our Head of Engineering and partner closely with customer-facing teams and founders while staying close enough to the technical work to guide execution, raise the bar on quality, unblock your team and develop AI-native engineers.

Your mission? Lead a high-performing AI-native engineering team to drive strong technical outcomes, and help deliver ambitious roadmap goals in a fast-moving environment.

How We Build

We believe that AI is fundamentally changing software and what it means to be an engineer. That means our team works differently:

• AI engineering (coding agents, loops, eval) is a core part of every engineer's workflow.
• Engineers own product areas and customer problems end-to-end, not just implementation.
• We prototype quickly, validate with customers, and iterate relentlessly.
• We ship continuously, often multiple times a day.
• We care about product impact as much as technical quality.

If you enjoy experimenting with frontier models, trying new tools, and constantly improving how you build software, you'll fit right in.

Meet The Team

• Paulwyn, Head of Engineering
• Peter, Engineering Manager

Your impact

• Lead and develop a team of 4 - 8 AI-native engineers, creating clarity and supporting performance, coaching, and execution in a high-trust environment.
• Elevate product thinking within your team so we build the right thing, tied to customer outcomes, not just tickets closed. You push the team from output to outcomes.
• Set the standard for AI-native engineering practices; coaching engineers on agentic workflows, context engineering, and eval discipline.
• Demonstrate technical credibility and contribute meaningfully in the codebase, joining design reviews, reviewing code, fixing bugs, and shipping small features.
• Own quality and reliability; on-call health, running honest postmortems, closing the build-and-run loop.
• Handle tough conversations with empathy and conviction, including feedback, alignment challenges, and expectation setting.
• Hire bar-raising candidates by partnering closely with Talent Acquisition to execute hiring plans and close strong engineers.

Who We’re Looking For

In one-line: a hands-on AI-native engineering manager who cares deeply about customer outcomes, brings strong product thinking and enjoys leading small fast-moving AI teams.

You’ll likely thrive here if you demonstrate:

• AI-Native Building: You are hands-on and fluent in what is possible with coding agents — using AI daily to build context, decompose problems, orchestrating build, reviewing quality and can show that you’ve shipped non-trivial work in practice.
• Product Thinking & Judgement: You think like a product owner and reason from customer outcomes. You care about building the right thing, understand who uses what your team ships, why it matters to the business and make tough calls on what to kill.
• People Leadership: Track record of managing high performing engineering teams of comparable scope (4-8 engineers) in problem-dense environments.
• Technical Credibility: You bring technical depth in backend, APIs, distributed systems and stay meaningfully hands-on in the codebase, ship things, contribute to design reviews and technical decision-making.
• Hiring Excellence: You are a talent magnet and have personally closed strong engineers. You know what it means to hire great AI-native engineers.
• Belief in our mission. You raise the standard for people around you, you're comfortable with ambiguity and pace, and you believe a smaller AI-native team can out-build a larger, traditional one.

Our Tech Stack (so far)

Experience in our exact stack is not required — what matters more is how fast you can pick up a new one, and how deeply you already use AI coding agents as part of your daily workflow.

• Frontend: React, Vue.js, Typescript
• Backend: Express.js, Node.js, Typescript, Python
• Database: PostgreSQL, MongoDB
• Cloud Infrastructure: AWS, Vercel, Terraform, Kubernetes
• AI Coding Tools: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more

Why Join Us?

• Work at the forefront of AI with a nimble team that is constantly pushing boundaries. We encourage and celebrate ideas that drive our mission forward.
• We’re guided by our six principles: eyes on the prize, work on the factory - not just in it, be truth-seeking, know your customer by name, let's find a way, and momentum matters.
• We’ve set high standards in our high-trust, low-ego environment. We hire exceptional people to do the best work of their lives. In return, we reward our people with competitive salaries, equity stake, unparalleled professional growth, and career-defining opportunities.
• Relevance AI is well-funded by leading investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Insights Partners, Peak XV, and King River Capital.
• As an early team member, you’ll play a key role in shaping our future—including our culture, ways of working, and even the benefits we offer. We’re laying the foundations now, and your ideas can help define what comes next.

Benefits

• ESOP – Employee Stock Ownership Plan so you can grow with the company
• AI Productivity Benefit – Get up to $1200 USD/year to spend on AI tools that help you work smarter and grow your skills
• Parental Leave – We offer 12 weeks of paid parental leave for all eligible new parents, and an additional 6 weeks for the birthing parent
• Milestone Merch – Celebrate your work anniversaries with customised Relevance AI swag
• Food, Drinks & Community – Stay energised with free breakfasts, healthy snacks, and a fully stocked fridge of drinks. Enjoy team lunches provided every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, plus Uber Eats dinners and regular catered office meals throughout the week. As the home of the AI workforce, we also host vibrant community events featuring thought leaders, industry partners, and the wider tech community.
• Quarterly Team Events – Build stronger connections through fun, meaningful team bonding experiences every quarter
• Social Clubs – Share your hobbies and interests by joining or starting a club with your teammates. From hiking and chess to board game nights and social committee activities—there’s something for everyone!
• Sonder EAP – Access 24/7 mental health and wellbeing support through Sonder, our Employee Assistance Program

#LI-Hybrid