Senior Engineering Manager, AI Foundations & Search (On-site NYC)

Ontra, LLC; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Twice yearly team offsites

Paid flexible time off

Parental leave and benefits

Employer-supported retirement

Phone and internet reimbursement

Learning and development resources

Job summary

Ontra is seeking a Senior Manager, Engineering focused on Search and AI Foundations, reporting to the VP of Product Engineering. The role blends strategic leadership with hands‑on delivery, guiding high‑impact search and AI initiatives while growing resilient engineering teams.

You will lead the team that provides Ontra engineers with fast, safe, and measurable ways to build AI‑powered products, owning the search stack, AI platform, evaluation, observability, and agent infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience as an individual contributor and 3+ years of technical leadership in a high-growth company.
• Experience building or leading an ML/AI or developer platform that others depend on.
• Hands-on experience with search and LLM applications in production (indexing, relevance, model gateways).
• Strong foundation in Python, distributed systems, cloud infra (AWS, Kubernetes, SageMaker or similar).
• Ability to separate durable foundations from hype and make build‑vs‑buy decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap across search, LLM routing, evaluation, and agent infrastructure.
• Lead search and retrieval for Ontra’s AI search stack and related platforms.
• Make AI quality measurable with evaluation datasets and CI/online evaluation gates.
• Ensure security, reliability, and tenant isolation across platforms.
• Lead agent infrastructure and collaborate with cross‑functional teams to deliver solutions.

Skills

Senior IC

Technical leadership

ML/AI platform

Search systems

LLM applications

Soft communication

Tools

OpenSearch

Vector databases

Arize

MLflow

OpenTelemetry

Datadog

Job description

Ontra is seeking a Senior Manager, Engineering focused on Search and AI Foundations, reporting to the VP of Product Engineering. The role blends strategic leadership with hands‑on delivery, guiding high‑impact search and AI initiatives while growing resilient engineering teams.

You will lead the team that provides Ontra engineers with fast, safe, and measurable ways to build AI‑powered products, owning the search stack, AI platform, evaluation, observability, and agent infrastructure.