Engineering Manager, AI Infrastructure

Mixpanel; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 279,000 - 377,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive Medical, Vision, and Dental Care

Generous Vacation Policy & Additional Company Holidays

Enhanced Parental Leave

401(K) Pre-Tax Benefits

Wellness Benefit

Job summary

Mixpanel is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead AI-first product experiences. This role requires significant expertise in managing engineering teams and developing robust infrastructure for customer-facing applications. Successful candidates will demonstrate exceptional leadership skills and a commitment to innovation, making a vital contribution to Mixpanel's future.

Offering a competitive salary ranging between $279,000 and $377,000, Mixpanel provides comprehensive benefits, including medical, vision, and dental care, alongside a generous vacation policy.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience; 4+ years leading engineering teams.
• Experience building infrastructure for web applications.
• Experience with AI-powered products in production.

Responsibilities

• Lead and build AI-first product experiences from inception to global scale.
• Grow the engineering team and develop its capabilities.
• Shape technical direction and maintain system quality.

Skills

AI-powered product development

Engineering team leadership

Infrastructure management

Collaboration with product teams

Technical tradeoff judgment

Accountability and ownership

Job description

Mixpanel turns data clarity into innovation. Trusted by more than 29,000 companies, including Workday, Pinterest, LG, and Rakuten Viber, Mixpanel’s AI‑first digital analytics help teams accelerate adoption, improve retention, and ship with confidence. Powering this is an industry‑leading platform that combines product and web analytics, session replay, experimentation, feature flags, and metric trees. Mixpanel delivers insights that customers trust.

About the Team

Mixpanel Engineering is a small, fast‑moving team focused on delivering real value to customers. We build powerful AI‑powered product analytics while obsessing over clarity, simplicity, and delight. Engineers here own problems end to end. You can move across the stack to ship impact without being blocked by silos or heavy process. Product innovation drives our business, and product engineering teams own that responsibility.

About the Role

This team solves stateful distributed systems problems, handling processing and ingestion and storage at scale and low cost. The entire Infrastructure group focuses on high‑scale customer data, operating as a force multiplier for the broader company as it moves toward an AI‑first product.

Together, these teams are driving foundational initiatives like elastic query compute, distributed file caching, real‑time data streaming, and AI‑ready APIs that will underpin the next generation of the product. Collectively, they combine deep expertise in high‑scale distributed systems and backend engineering to ensure Mixpanel’s infrastructure is reliable, performant, and a core part of the broader data ecosystem ready for the demands of an AI‑driven future.

• Teams operate as autonomous pods, with engineering, product, and design working side by side on clear strategic goals. Teams have direct access to customer feedback, product usage data, business metrics, and design context.
• We start with customer problems. We reason from first principles. We challenge assumptions. We aim for simple solutions to complex problems and avoid unnecessary abstraction.
• Engineering owns execution, quality, and operations. There are no project managers, QA teams, or separate SREs. Ownership stays with the people building the product.
• We value written thinking, dashboards, and demos over slide decks. We work openly using tools like Slack, GitHub, Mixpanel, Notion, Figma, and Zoom.
• Our team is distributed across North America, with strong clusters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Austin.

Responsibilities

• Lead and build AI‑first product experiences from inception to global scale.
• Lead an engineering team and grow its scope over time. This role is for someone who loves developing people and unlocking their potential.
• Build an exceptional team by hiring well, coaching deeply, and creating a culture where engineers feel ownership and pride in what they ship.
• Shape direction alongside Product, turning big ideas into focused execution and helping teams move fast without losing quality.
• Set the technical bar and protect the system. Depending on level, this may mean hands‑on technical leadership or empowering tech leads with clarity and trust.

Requirements

• 10+ years engineering experience; 4+ years leading engineering teams
• Experience building and running infrastructure supporting real‑world, customer‑facing web applications.
• Experience building and using AI‑powered products in production environments.
• Proven collaboration with product managers and designers on meaningful infrastructure.
• Strong judgment in technical tradeoffs, backed by lessons learned.
• Evidence of leadership through influence, alignment, and growing others.
• Director candidates must have experience managing managers.
• Skilled at navigating ambiguity, making tradeoffs, and bringing clarity to complex org structures.
• High level of ownership, accountability, and product intuition.

The amount listed below is the total target cash compensation (TTCC) and includes base compensation and variable compensation in the form of either a company bonus or commissions. Variable compensation type is determined by your role and level. In addition to the cash compensation provided, this position is also eligible for equity consideration and other benefits including medical, vision, and dental insurance coverage.

$279,000 - $377,000 USD

Benefits and Perks

• Comprehensive Medical, Vision, and Dental Care
• Generous Vacation Policy & Additional Company Holidays
• Enhanced Parental Leave
• Additional US Benefits: Pre‑Tax Benefits including 401(K), Wellness Benefit, Holiday Break

Please note that benefits and perks for contract positions will vary.

Culture Values

• Make Bold Bets: We choose courageous action over comfortable progress.
• Innovate with Insight: We tackle decisions with rigor and judgment – combining data, experience and collective wisdom to drive powerful outcomes.
• One Team: We collaborate across boundaries to achieve far greater impact than any of us could accomplish alone.
• Candor with Connection: We build meaningful relationships that enable honest feedback and direct conversations.
• Champion the Customer: We seek to deeply understand our customers’ needs, ensuring their success is our north star.
• Powerful Simplicity: We find elegant solutions to complex problems, making sophisticated things accessible.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Mixpanel is an equal opportunity employer supporting workforce diversity. At Mixpanel, we are focused on things that really matter—our people, our customers, our partners—out of a recognition that those relationships are the most valuable assets we have. We actively encourage women, people with disabilities, veterans, underrepresented minorities, and LGBTQ+ people to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance or other similar laws that may be applicable, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. We’ve immersed ourselves in our Culture and Values as our guiding principles for the impact we want to have and the future we are building.