Senior Engineering Manager, ML Platform

Boston Dynamics; Waltham (MA); On-site; USD 198,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Dental benefits

Vision benefits

401(k)

Paid time off

Annual bonus structure

Job summary

Boston Dynamics in Waltham is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead their Machine Learning Platform Team. This pivotal role involves strategic oversight and hands-on contributions as you help scale the team from 4 to about 12 engineers, ensuring systems are robust and efficient.

The ideal candidate will have extensive engineering experience, particularly in building platform infrastructures, and the ability to communicate effectively across teams. A competitive benefits package is also offered including medical and 401(k).

Qualifications

• 7-12 years of engineering experience with 2-3 years in management or tech lead.
• Experience scaling a platform or ML systems team.
• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead the ML Platform Team's strategy and execution.
• Make architectural decisions for scalable infrastructure.
• Mentor and develop engineers while building team culture.

Skills

Leadership in ML infrastructure

Cross-functional communication

Hands-on coding and debugging

GPU/distributed compute infrastructure

Tools

Kubernetes

Slurm

Ray

Job description

We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our ML Platform Team - a growing team responsible for the foundational infrastructure that powers our machine learning work. This is a player‑coach role: you'll set technical direction and contribute hands‑on while building out the team and establishing the processes that will scale with it.

The platform is in its early stages, with some foundations in place. You'll be joining at a pivotal moment - making architectural decisions that will shape how the team and the platform grow from 4 engineers today to a team of 10–12.

What You'll Work On

Infrastructure Leadership

• Own the strategy, roadmap, and execution for GPU compute infrastructure, ensuring it scales to meet growing model training and fine‑tuning demands
• Contribute directly to infrastructure design and implementation, particularly in the near term as the team grows
• Drive reliability, performance, and cost efficiency across distributed training clusters. Optimize existing and new training workloads to achieve scale.
• Evaluate and adopt new hardware (GPUs, TPUs, custom accelerators) and cloud/on‑prem infrastructure as the team's needs evolve

Data Platform Ownership

• Oversee the design and operation of data storage, indexing, and retrieval systems that support large‑scale dataset generation
• Ensure data pipelines are performant, fault‑tolerant, and meet the quality and freshness requirements of ML teams
• Establish early‑stage standards for data access, lineage, and governance — pragmatic and scalable, not over‑engineered

Shared Tooling & Developer Experience

• Lead the development and maintenance of shared libraries and frameworks for data transformation pipelines
• Partner with ML researchers and engineers to understand their workflows and translate them into reliable, reusable platform capabilities
• Champion developer productivity - reduce friction for teams consuming platform services

Technical Strategy & Architecture

• Lay the architectural foundations of the platform, making decisions that are pragmatic today but designed to scale to a 10–12 person team and beyond
• Make key architectural decisions around compute orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes, Slurm, Ray), storage systems, and pipeline frameworks
• Balance short‑term delivery with long‑term platform health — knowing when to build, buy, or borrow

Cross‑functional Collaboration

• Act as a technical partner to ML research, data engineering, and product teams - translating needs into platform priorities
• Communicate roadmap, incidents, and technical tradeoffs clearly to both engineers and senior leadership
• Help ML teams become self‑sufficient on the platform, reducing bottlenecks on the platform team itself

Team Building & Management

• Actively participate in hiring to grow the team from 4 to ~10–12 engineers, including defining roles and leveling
• Mentor and develop engineers, establishing a team culture early that will hold as headcount scales
• Define lightweight but durable team processes - on‑call rotations, incident response, and engineering standards that won't need to be rebuilt at scale
• Be comfortable doing IC work yourself while simultaneously building the team's capacity to take it on

What We're Looking For

• 7–12 years of engineering experience, with at least 2–3 years in a formal management or tech lead capacity
• Demonstrated experience building or scaling a platform, infrastructure, or ML systems team from the ground up
• Technical credibility in one or more of: GPU/distributed compute infrastructure, large‑scale data storage and retrieval, or data pipeline frameworks
• Experience making foundational architectural decisions in an early‑stage or greenfield environment
• Strong cross‑functional communication skills - able to translate between ML researchers, engineers, and senior leadership
• Comfortable with ambiguity; able to define the roadmap rather than just execute against one
• A hands‑on mindset - willing and able to write code, review designs, and debug production issues alongside your team

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with compute orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes, Slurm, or Ray
• Experience with ML training workflows, dataset generation pipelines, or feature stores
• Prior experience growing a team through a hiring ramp (e.g. doubling or tripling headcount)

The base pay range for this position is between $198,000.00 to $300,000.00 annually. Base pay will depend on multiple individualized factors, including, but not limited to, internal equity, job‑related knowledge, skills, and experience. This range represents a good‑faith estimate of compensation at the time of posting. Boston Dynamics offers a generous benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401(k), paid time off, and an annual bonus structure. Additional details regarding these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer for employment.