Engineering Manager – Applied AI

General Matter; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Medical, vision & dental

401(k)

Job summary

General Matter is seeking an experienced Applied AI leader in Los Angeles to spearhead an AI-first engineering initiative. The role combines management with hands-on development, exploring LLMs, AI agents, and tool-use to redefine engineering workflows across licensing, safety, and manufacturing teams.

You will drive technical direction, hire and mentor engineers, and ensure scalable practices while delivering high-impact AI-enabled solutions that accelerate product and defense-grade workflows.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering or applied AI experience.
• 2+ years of experience managing, mentoring, or growing software or applied AI engineers.
• Demonstrated experience building and shipping software using LLMs, AI agents, or other modern AI techniques.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in Python.
• BS or higher in engineering, physics, chemistry, applied math, computer science, or a related technical field.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the Applied AI team: Hire, develop, and retain engineers while setting a high technical bar.
• Own technical direction and prioritization: Identify the highest-leverage engineering problems and decide where the team should invest its time.
• Stay hands-on: Review architecture, solve difficult technical problems, and contribute to implementation when appropriate.
• Partner with engineering teams across General Matter: Work directly with licensing, safety, design, manufacturing, and other technical teams to understand their workflows and identify opportunities for AI-driven leverage.
• Build scalable engineering practices: Establish the processes for project selection, prototyping, evaluation, and production handoff that allow the team to grow without losing speed.
• Represent Applied AI across the company: Communicate technical direction, progress, and tradeoffs to company leadership and cross-functional partners.

Skills

Applied AI experience

People management

Python proficiency

Engineering leadership

Code review & architecture

Education

BS or higher in engineering/CS/physics/math

Tools

LLMs & AI agents

Python

Job description

About the company

General Matter enriches uranium. We are designing, building, and operating the world’s lowest-cost enrichment services, here in the US. In the process, we are restoring America’s ability to produce nuclear fuel to power AI, advanced manufacturing and critical industries our country relies on to remain competitive. Fuel drives the cost of advanced reactor electricity production, and enrichment drives the cost of the fuel that advanced reactors consume. Reliable, low-cost enrichment is the catalyst for the nuclear Renaissance now under way. Our mission is to make nuclear not only the cleanest and safest source of baseload power, but also the most affordable. We believe abundant nuclear energy will lead to a post-scarcity society. We were incubated inside Founders Fund, like Anduril and Palantir before us, and are backed by over a dozen of the world's top venture capital firms. Our lean, world-class team of engineers and operators is applying a first-principles approach to solving the problem of nuclear fuel production. We are a mission-driven company with a culture of urgency, accountability, and transparency. Help us build a high-energy society by making the cleanest, safest form of baseload energy the most affordable.

About the Role

General Matter has a massive body of critical-path engineering work ahead — nuclear licensing, integrated safety analysis, design criteria, technoeconomic modeling. Conventional timelines for this work are too slow. We believe there is an opportunity to reinvent every single engineering workflow using modern AI. The Applied AI team embeds with engineering teams across the company with a single focus: make existing engineering workflows significantly faster.You identify the bottleneck, build the tool, and move to the next problem. This is an opportunity to define what AI‑first engineering looks like at a nuclear company. The nuclear industry has done things the same way for decades. Assumptions that everyone takes for granted — “this analysis requires a PhD specialist,” “this document takes three months to draft,” “this review has to be fully manual” — are all open questions now. You get to challenge every one of them, across every team.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the Applied AI team: Hire, develop, and retain engineers while setting a high technical bar.
• Own technical direction and prioritization: Identify the highest-leverage engineering problems and decide where the team should invest its time.
• Stay hands‑on: Review architecture, solve difficult technical problems, and contribute to implementation when appropriate.
• Partner with engineering teams across General Matter: Work directly with licensing, safety, design, manufacturing, and other technical teams to understand their workflows and identify opportunities for AI-driven leverage.
• Build scalable engineering practices: Establish the processes for project selection, prototyping, evaluation, and production handoff that allow the team to grow without losing speed.
• Represent Applied AI across the company: Communicate technical direction, progress, and tradeoffs to company leadership and cross‑functional partners.

Basic Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering or applied AI experience.
• 2+ years of experience managing, mentoring, or growing software or applied AI engineers.
• Demonstrated experience building and shipping software using LLMs, AI agents, or other modern AI techniques.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in Python.
• BS or higher in engineering, physics, chemistry, applied math, computer science, or a related technical field.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Technical leader who still codes: You enjoy reviewing PRs, debating architecture, and jumping into difficult technical problems. This is not a role you can do from a distance.
• AI fluency: You have hands‑on experience with technologies such as LLMs, RAG, tool‑use architectures, and AI agents, and think critically about where AI can create meaningful leverage.
• Strong engineering judgment: You can quickly understand technical problems across disciplines and evaluate whether your team’s approach is sound without needing to be the domain expert.
• Workflow‑oriented mindset: You’re excited by finding ways to fundamentally improve how engineering teams work, rather than simply adding AI to existing processes.
• Builds high‑agency teams: You hire and develop engineers who take ownership, move quickly, and solve problems without waiting for a detailed roadmap or specification.
• Experience scaling small teams: You’ve helped a high‑context engineering team add structure and process while preserving speed, autonomy, and technical quality.

Additional Requirements

• Ability to work extended hours and weekends as necessary.

Equal Opportunity Employer

General Matter is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with General Matter is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.

Compensation and Benefits

The base salary range for this role is $220,000-$300,000 annually.

Compensation bands are determined by role, level, location, and alignment with market data. Individual level and base pay is determined on a case‑by‑case basis and may vary based on job‑related skills, education, experience, technical capabilities and internal equity. In addition to base salary, for full‑time hires, you may also be eligible for long‑term incentives, in the form of stock options, and access to medical, vision & dental coverage as well as access to a 401(k) retirement plan.