Senior Engineering Manager

Compass; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 226,000 - 251,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonuses & RSUs

Comprehensive benefits

Paid time off

Job summary

Compass is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for the AI Platform Team to lead the AI Engineering Hub within our Staff AI Enablement Organization. You will guide the Tier 1 platform foundation and Tier 2 enablement efforts, managing a hybrid team of engineers and contractors to deliver secure, scalable AI primitives and workflows.

You will partner with senior leadership to define the platform roadmap, oversee governance, and drive operational excellence.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record building scalable platforms.
• 6+ years leading software engineering squads, including senior/staff engineers.
• Fluency with modern LLM architectures, vector databases, prompting, RAG and orchestration.
• Experience managing blended teams of FTEs and contractors with high output.
• Strong focus on security, data residency, IAM and regulatory compliance.

Responsibilities

• Directly manage and grow a hybrid team of engineers and contractors.
• Define and execute the roadmap for foundational AI platform primitives.
• Partner with Finance, Legal, Ops and other departments to enable automated AI workflows.
• Oversee architecture decisions to ensure security and governance alignment.
• Establish metrics for performance, latency and cost observability.
• Allocate resources effectively between core team and flexible contractors.
• Communicate system tenets and architectural plans to stakeholders.

Skills

10+ years software engineering

People management

Generative AI stack

Hybrid team leadership

Security & governance

Cross-functional collaboration

Clear communication

Job description

At Compass, our mission is to help everyone find their place in the world. Founded in 2012, we’re revolutionizing the real estate industry with our end-to-end platform that empowers residential real estate agents to deliver exceptional service to seller and buyer clients.

As the Senior Engineering Manager for the AI Platform Team, you will lead the AI Engineering Hub of our newly established Staff AI Enablement Organization. In this highly visible role, you will bridge the gap between complex infrastructure and real-world business impact. Your mandate is two-fold: overseeing the Tier 1 Platform Foundation (building reusable, secure AI primitives like agent inference, prompt tuning, and orchestration) and coordinating the Tier 2 Staff Enablement efforts (partnering directly with departments like Finance, Legal, and Transaction Management to deploy deep, domain-specific workflow automations).

You will manage a lean, high-caliber, hybrid team of full-time Compass software engineers—ranging from Junior to Staff-level—alongside a flexible pool of strategic contractors. By treating the platform as a product, you will build a secure, unified "AI Platform Flywheel" that protects proprietary company data while systematically cutting operational overhead to capture millions in business efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Lead and Develop Talent: Directly manage, mentor, and grow a hybrid team of full-time engineers and contractors. Cultivate a high-performing culture through individualized coaching, clear performance standards, and proactive career pathing.
• Drive AI Platform Strategy: Formulate and execute the roadmap for foundational AI platform primitives (agent orchestration, LLM gateway, telemetry, secure caching, etc.) in close collaboration with senior leadership and Principal Engineers.
• Accelerate Business Enablement: Deeply partner with corporate departments (Finance, Legal, Ops, etc.) to identify automation opportunities, translating operational processes into structured AI integrations that run on your platform primitives.
• Enforce Strict AI Governance: Oversee technical design and architecture to ensure all AI tools strictly adhere to information security, data residency, and identity and access management (IAM) guidelines.
• Promote Operational Excellence: Establish and monitor clear performance metrics (accuracy, latency, token consumption, and cost observability). Implement robust logging, alerting, and rapid incident response systems.
• Balance Strategic Resources: Make critical, data-driven decisions on team structure and resource allocation, deciding when to leverage flexible contractors for short-term velocity versus retaining core technical architecture inside our FTE footprint.
• Deliver Compelling Communication: Drive high-level technical and strategic written communication (e.g., system tenets, architectural plans, and project charters) to align multiple cross-functional stakeholders around technical trade-offs.

Requirements

• Strong Technical Background: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of building scalable developer platforms, APIs, SaaS infrastructure, or centralized backend frameworks.
• Direct People Management: 6+ years of experience leading software engineering squads, with proven success managing senior and staff-level engineers, as well as geographically distributed teams.
• Fluency in the Generative AI Stack: Deep familiarity with modern LLM application architectures, vector databases, prompt design, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agent orchestration libraries.
• Hybrid Team Stewardship: Experience managing a blended team model of full-time employees and contractors, keeping quality bars high while driving execution velocity.
• Comfort with Ambiguity: A proven self-starter who can take open-ended business problems and shape them into clear, structured, and phased engineering plans with minimal guidance.
• Customer Empathy & Product Mindset: Demonstrated ability to understand the pain points of internal "customers" (non-technical business departments) and package platform capabilities into intuitive, reliable internal products.
• Security & Compliance Aptitude: Solid understanding of enterprise security concepts, including IAM, data isolation, encryption, and regulatory compliance standards (e.g., SOC 2, PCI DSS) as they relate to cloud-based applications.

Compensation:

The base pay range for this position is $225,990-$251,100; however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Bonuses and restricted stock units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of benefits. Base pay is based on market location. Minimum wage for the position will always be met.

Perks That You Need To Know About

Participation in our incentive programs (which may include eligible cash, equity, or commissions). Plus paid vacation, holidays, sick time, parental leave, and recharge leave; medical, tele-health, dental and vision benefits; 401(k) plan; flexible spending accounts (FSAs); commuter program; life and disability insurance; Maven (a support system for new parents); Carrot (fertility benefits); UrbanSitter (caregiver referral network); Employee Assistance Program; and pet insurance.

Do your best work, be your authentic self.

At Compass, we believe that everyone deserves to find their place in the world — a place where they feel like they belong, where they can be their authentic selves, where they can thrive. Our collaborative, energetic culture is grounded in our Compass Entrepreneurship Principles and our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, growth and mobility. As an equal opportunity employer, we offer competitive compensation packages, robust benefits and professional growth opportunities aimed at helping to improve our employees' lives and careers.

Notice for California Applicants

Los Angeles County Fair Chance Notice