Manager, Applied AI Engineering

United States Digital Space LLC; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is looking for a Manager of Applied AI Engineers in San Francisco. In this role, you will lead a technical team serving Enterprise Tech customers, advising on LLM implementations and product deployments.

With a strong emphasis on team development, you'll hire and coach engineers and engage senior stakeholders. A Bachelor's degree and 7+ years of technical experience are required. The position offers a competitive salary of $300,000 to $405,000.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in technical roles, including experience leading teams.
• Proven track record in hiring and scaling customer-facing technical teams.
• Experience with advanced LLM prompting and deployment.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of Applied AI Engineers.
• Set performance goals and establish metrics.
• Advise customers on technical architecture design.

Skills

Technical leadership

Programming proficiency (Python or TypeScript)

LLM production experience

Engaging technical stakeholders

Cross-organizational collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Job description

About the company

The company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

As a Manager of Applied AI Engineers at the company, you will lead a team of deeply technical engineers who serve as trusted technical advisors to our Enterprise Tech customers — tech-forward companies, including those in verticals such as fintech and cybersecurity, that are adopting the Claude API into the core of their products. Your team works hands-on with customer product and engineering teams as they ship new products powered by Claude: advising on architecture decisions, developing evaluation frameworks, and guiding customers through the most cutting‑edge implementation patterns for LLMs.

You will hire, coach, and grow this team while staying close enough to the technology to set a high bar for engineering judgment. Working closely with our Sales, Product, and Engineering teams, you'll guide your team's portfolio of customers from technical discovery through successful deployment, turn one‑off wins into repeatable playbooks and reference architectures, and channel field insight back into the company's product roadmap — all while maintaining our high standards for safety and reliability. This is a fast-moving space at the frontier of what's possible with LLMs, and you'll help define how we scale technical impact across the segment.

Responsibilities

• Build, coach, and grow a team of Applied AI Engineers serving Enterprise Tech customers — hiring strong technical builders, developing them through structured feedback and clear competency expectations, and creating scalable onboarding for a customer-facing technical role.
• Set collaborative performance goals aligned with the segment's sales and consumption objectives, and establish the metrics, reporting cadence, and dashboards that keep cross‑functional stakeholders informed on team health and impact.
• Serve as a senior technical advisor to strategic customers as they deploy new products and workflows on Claude — guiding architecture design, evaluation strategy, and the most advanced prompting, agentic, and implementation patterns from discovery through deployment.
• Partner with account executives and solutions architects to translate customer business requirements into technical solutions, sequencing technical work to maximize value and orchestrating across teams to drive customer success.
• Identify the design patterns, pilots, prototypes, and evaluation suites that recur across engagements, and scale them from individual accounts into segment-wide assets your team can reuse.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to surface field signal, advocate for high‑impact product changes, and help shape the roadmap based on what enterprise builders need.
• Champion the creation of scalable public and internal assets documenting the latest LLM prompting, evaluation, agentic, and architecture techniques; contribute thought leadership through talks, blog posts, and white papers.
• Maintain strong, current knowledge of LLM capabilities, implementation patterns, and the AI product development stack, and translate it into practical guidance for your team and customers.
• Travel occasionally to customer sites for workshops, implementation support, and relationship building, and represent the company at conferences and speaking engagements.

You may be a good fit if you have

• 7+ years of experience in technical roles such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Software Engineer, Solutions/Sales Engineer, or Technical Product Manager, including experience leading and developing technical teams. Former technical founders are also encouraged to apply.
• Demonstrated success hiring, coaching, and scaling customer-facing technical teams, ideally in a fast-moving or hypergrowth environment.
• Production experience with LLMs, including advanced prompt engineering, agent development and frameworks, evaluation frameworks, transcript analysis, MCP, and deployment at scale — with the technical depth to set engineering standards and review your team's work credibly.
• Strong programming skills with proficiency in Python or TypeScript and experience building production applications.
• A track record engaging senior technical stakeholders — founders, CTOs, and engineering leaders — and influencing technical architecture and product strategy.
• The ability to navigate ambiguity and execute across domains with intellectual openness, finding simple solutions to complex problems.
• A high‑cooperation mindset for cross‑organizational collaboration, balancing competing priorities with integrity.
• Exceptional communication skills to convey technical concepts to diverse stakeholders while maintaining a low ego and collaborative approach.
• Passion for advancing safe, beneficial AI systems through creative technical applications.

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience leading technical teams through periods of rapid scale, balancing immediate execution with durable, long‑term architectural and platform decisions.
• Experience selling or delivering complex technical solutions to large enterprise customers, including engaging C-level stakeholders in significant technical evaluations.
• Experience partnering closely with Product and Engineering organizations to turn field signal into shipped product.
• Experience coaching engineers from purely technical roles into customer-facing, advisory work.

Deadline to apply

None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Annual Salary: $300,000 — $405,000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidac