Senior Engineering Manager, Capacity Engineering

Talanto; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 405,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity donation matching

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

SF office space

Job summary

Talanto in San Francisco is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for Capacity Engineering to lead a growing team responsible for data platform, planning and efficiency, and billing/usage tooling.

You will partner with research engineering, inference, infrastructure, and finance to align on capacity decisions, set roadmaps, and drive reliable, scalable systems. The role blends leadership with hands-on technical reviews and incident involvement.

Qualifications

• Experience leading software or infrastructure teams, hiring and developing engineers.
• Hands-on with production systems, reviewing designs and debugging.
• Familiar with AWS, GCP, or Azure and Kubernetes-based infrastructure.
• Excellent communication with researchers, finance, and executives.
• Comfort with on-call and incident management.
• Ability to translate roadmap into prioritized engineering work.

Responsibilities

• Be hands-on, lead and grow the team.
• Champion internal customers and align with their needs.
• Own the roadmap and translate strategy into a prioritized plan.
• Set the technical bar with robust design reviews and on-call readiness.
• Run the team as a product organization with clear requirements and contracts.
• Be the primary partner for cross-functional stakeholders across leadership.
• Drive operational excellence and reduce toil while scaling the function.
• Scale the capacity engineering function as the fleet and requirements evolve.

Skills

Team management

Cloud familiarity

Kubernetes

Observability

Roadmap execution

Communication

On-call ownership

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

BigQuery

Job description

Senior Engineering Manager, Capacity Engineering

Important: if an employer asks you to log into their system via iCloud or Google, send a code, an SMS or Telegram password, run some code, or install software — refuse. These are signs of fraud.

••••••••• ’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

••••••••• manages one of the largest and fastest-growing infrastructure fleets in the industry — spanning multiple accelerator families, CPU families, and clouds. The Capacity Engineering team is responsible for making sure all of our infrastructure resources are accounted for, well-utilized, and efficiently allocated. We own the data, tooling, and operational systems that let ••••••••• plan, measure, and maximize utilization across first-party and third-party compute — one of the company's largest areas of spend.

As the Senior Engineering Manager for Capacity Engineering, you will lead the team that builds and operates these production systems. You'll set technical direction, grow and develop a team of senior and staff-level engineers, and be accountable for the reliability and correctness of surfaces that leadership, research engineering, inference, infrastructure, and finance all depend on. This is a hands-on leadership role: we expect you to stay close enough to the systems to review designs, make sound architectural calls, and step into an incident when the team needs you — while spending most of your time on people, priorities, and cross-organizational alignment.

The team's work spans three overlapping areas, and you'll be responsible for balancing investment across them as business priorities shift:

• Data platform — Pipelines that ingest occupancy and utilization telemetry from Kubernetes clusters, normalize billing and usage across cloud providers, and serve the BigQuery tables the rest of the org queries against. Consumers range from research engineers to finance to leadership, so this is product work as much as engineering.
• Planning and Assurance — Making the state of the fleet legible and actionable in real time: cluster health tooling, capacity planning platforms, alerting on occupancy drops and allocation problems, and systemic fixes to scheduling and fragmentation.
• Efficiency — Measuring and improving how effectively every major workload uses the hardware it runs on, across training, inference, and evals. Building benchmarking infrastructure and per-config baselines, then partnering with system-owning teams to close the gaps.

Key Responsibilities

• Be hands-on, lead and grow the team. Hire, onboard, coach, and retain senior and staff engineers. Set clear expectations, give direct and timely feedback, run performance and leveling conversations, and build a team culture that values ownership, rigor, and collaboration.
• Champion your internal customers. We build for our own use cases, so the teams that depend on our systems — research engineering, inference, infrastructure, and finance — are your customers. Engage with them directly, bring what you learn back into the roadmap, and lead the team in building tools people genuinely want to use.
• Own the roadmap. Translate company-level compute strategy into a prioritized engineering roadmap across data platform, planning and efficiency. Make explicit trade-offs when priorities compete, and communicate them clearly upward and outward.
• Set the technical bar. Review designs, weigh in on architecture, and hold the team to production standards — well-tested Python and SQL, latency and completeness SLOs, gap detection, and on-call that is sustainable.
• Run the team as a product organization. Ensure the team gathers its own requirements, defines schema contracts, and designs for a wide range of consumers — from research engineers to a CFO. Treat data quality and discoverability as first-class deliverables.
• Be the primary partner for cross-functional stakeholders. Work closely with infrastructure, inference, research engineering, and finance leadership to align on capacity decisions, efficiency targets, and spend. Represent the team's data and recommendations to senior leadership.
• Drive operational excellence. Own reliability and incident response for load-bearing systems, establish SLOs and on-call practices, and continuously reduce operational toil so the team can spend its time on higher-leverage work.
• Scale the function. As the fleet diversifies (every new provider is a net-new integration), anticipate where the team needs to grow in headcount, skills, and systems — and make the case for it.

What You Bring

• Experience managing software or infrastructure engineering teams, including hiring senior engineers, managing performance, and developing people into larger scope.
• A strong technical background in production systems — data engineering, infrastructure, distributed systems, or observability — with hands-on experience you can still draw on when reviewing designs or debugging with the team.
• Familiarity with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Kubernetes-based infrastructure, and modern observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana).
• A track record of setting and executing an engineering roadmap in an ambiguous, high-autonomy environment with many stakeholders and shifting priorities.
• Excellent communication skills: you can explain a utilization metric to a research engineer and a spend forecast to a CFO, and you can advocate clearly for your team's priorities with senior leadership.
• Comfort owning operational responsibility for systems the company depends on, including on-call and incident management.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading teams working on capacity planning, resource management, product engineering or FinOps at a hyperscaler or in a large-scale ML environment.
• Familiarity with accelerator infrastructure — GPU metrics (DCGM), TPU utilization, or ML training and inference systems at the hardware level.
• Experience with multi-cloud billing and telemetry normalization (billing exports, reservation APIs, commitments, on-demand capacity reservations).
• Experience building or leading internal data products with self-service access, schema contracts, and documentation.
• Background in scheduling, packing efficiency, or profiling-driven optimization of large distributed workloads.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:$405,000—$485,000 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 candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At ••••••••• we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to ••••••••• , including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

••••••••• is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage:Learn aboutour policy for using AI in our application process.