Senior Engineering Manager

Compass; Town of Florida (NY); On-site; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Incentive programs

Paid vacation and parental leave

Medical and dental benefits

401(k) plan

Pet insurance

Job summary

Compass is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for the AI Platform Team located in New York, Town of Florida. You will oversee AI engineering and bridge complex infrastructure with real-world business impact.
In this role, you will lead a hybrid team and collaborate with various departments to develop automated workflows, while maintaining strict AI governance and operational excellence.

The ideal candidate will possess extensive software engineering experience and a strong background in managing teams, particularly in generative AI and security compliance.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering with scalable platforms.
• 6+ years of leading engineering teams, especially senior engineers.
• High familiarity with LLM application architectures and RAG.

Responsibilities

• Manage and mentor a hybrid team of engineers and contractors.
• Formulate the roadmap for AI platform primitives.
• Identify automation opportunities via collaboration with departments.

Skills

Software engineering experience

People management

Generative AI stack knowledge

Hybrid team management

Customer empathy

Security and compliance understanding

Job description

Senior Engineering Manager for the AI Platform Team

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.

Benefits

• Participation in our incentive programs (eligible cash, equity, or commissions).
• Paid vacation, holidays, sick time, parental leave, and recharge leave.
• Medical, tele‑health, dental and vision benefits.
• 401(k) plan, flexible spending accounts (FSAs), and commuter program.
• Life and disability insurance.
• Employee Assistance Program.
• Pet insurance.

At Compass, we believe that everyone deserves to find their place in the world. 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.