Senior Engineering Manager, AI-Driven Cloud Platform

Illumio; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 240,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Illumio is seeking a senior backend engineering leader in Sunnyvale to guide a team building scalable cloud services and AI-enabled platform capabilities. You will drive architecture for distributed systems, mentor managers, and collaborate with Product, Security, Infrastructure, and Data Science to deliver high-impact features.

You will influence technical direction, promote best practices for reliability and observability, and help shape the AI roadmap with LLM integrations and agentic

Qualifications

• 10+ years building distributed and scalable backend systems.
• 3+ years leading software engineering teams and engineering leads/managers.
• Strong experience in Java, Go, Python, or equivalent backend technologies.
• Deep expertise with microservices, APIs, cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, and containerized workloads.
• Experience building high-scale distributed systems and event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka).
• Practical understanding of modern AI systems including LLMs, AI agents, RAG architectures, and model serving.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of backend engineers building scalable cloud services and AI-powered platform features.
• Drive technical strategy and execution for distributed systems and APIs.
• Partner with Product, Security, Infrastructure, and Data Science to deliver platform experiences.
• Define architecture for large-scale microservices and cloud-native apps.
• Shape Illumio's AI roadmap, including agentic workflows and LLM integrations.
• Establish engineering best practices around reliability, observability, and security.
• Mentor engineering managers and senior engineers; promote ownership and innovation.
• Drive quarterly planning, staffing strategy, and architectural reviews.

Skills

Distributed backend

Team leadership

Java

Go

Python

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

APIs

AI/ML concepts

Event-driven systems

Kafka

Langfuse

Tools

Kafka

Terraform

Langfuse

Job description

Illumio is seeking a senior backend engineering leader in Sunnyvale to guide a team building scalable cloud services and AI-enabled platform capabilities. You will drive architecture for distributed systems, mentor managers, and collaborate with Product, Security, Infrastructure, and Data Science to deliver high-impact features.

You will influence technical direction, promote best practices for reliability and observability, and help shape the AI roadmap with LLM integrations and agentic