Senior Manager, Engineering

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

About Ontra

Ontra is the leader in AI-powered solutions for the private markets. Powered by industry-leading AI, data from over 2 million contracts, and a global network of legal professionals, Ontra automates critical private market workflows across the fund lifecycle. Ontra’s solutions transform unstructured data trapped in static documents into actionable intelligence, enabling firms to accelerate contracts, streamline compliance, and automate entity management. Trusted by more than 1,000 global GPs, investment banks, law firms, and advisors – including nine of the top ten PEI-ranked firms worldwide – Ontra helps firms focus on what’s important.

Our Culture

Ontra is built for people who want real ownership from day one in an environment that’s built to support it. Our customers are sophisticated, and our work reflects that. AI is engrained in how we work, and curiosity about it is part of who we are.

Ontranauts are sharp, genuinely collaborative, and invested in each other's success. They are excellent at what they do and even better to work with. That combination is rare, and we don't take it for granted. Learn more about our values.

For this job, we are currently only hiring candidates based in New York and require on-site work at our New York office three days per week. For more information on where we employ, please see below.

About the Role

Ontra is seeking a Senior Manager, Engineering, focused on Search and AI Foundations, reporting to the VP of Product Engineering.

This role is both strategic and hands-on, owning delivery of high-impact search and AI platform initiatives while growing strong, resilient engineering teams.

As the Senior Engineering Manager for Search and AI Foundations, you will lead the team that gives every Ontra engineer a fast, safe, and measurable way to build AI-powered products. The team owns Ontra’s search stack, including semantic and AI-powered search over customer documents and entity data, alongside the AI platform: LLM access and routing across commercial and open-weight models, the evaluation platform, LLM observability, ML service infrastructure, data anonymization, and the agent platform that takes teams from agent idea to a deployed, evaluated agent.

This work is core to Ontra’s long-term product strategy.

This is a critical leadership role for someone who thrives at the intersection of technical architecture, people leadership, and cross-functional execution.

The role is a great opportunity for someone who enjoys being hands-on while leading a team of AI engineers. If you are interested in not only designing solutions but also shaping the engineering culture for a growing team, this role would be a great fit.

If you have a proven track record of building platforms other teams depend on, developing high-performance teams and systems, and you thrive in a highly collaborative environment, we’d love to get to know you!

What You’ll Do

• Own the roadmap: Set priorities across search, LLM routing, evaluation, and agent infrastructure. Decide when to re-architect, when to hold a launch, and what to build, adopt, or buy. Treat the platform as a product and track adoption, cost, and latency
• Lead search and retrieval: Own the search stack behind Ontra’s AI search, including indexing, retrieval, relevance, and search quality
• Make AI quality measurable: Drive a shared evaluation approach for search and AI (datasets, LLM-as-judge, CI regression gates, online evals) so teams can ship changes with confidence
• Own security and reliability: Set the bar for tenant isolation, security review, incident response, and multi-provider failover across search and model access
• Lead agent infrastructure: Shape how Ontra builds, versions, runs, and audits agents and skills on one shared platform
• Collaborate: Partner with Product, Architecture, Security, DevOps, and domain experts to rapidly deliver solutions to our customers that also serve our long-term business objectives
• Inspire: Hire, coach, and grow engineers, and lead the team to embrace a high-performance culture where we all aspire to greatness

What You’ll Bring

• Experience: 8+ years of experience as an individual contributor and 3+ years of technical leadership in a high-growth, scaling company managing senior engineers
• Platform track record: A history of building or leading an ML, AI, or developer platform that other teams depend on, with clear adoption and impact
• LLM and ML systems depth: Hands-on experience with search and LLM applications in production, such as indexing and relevance (e.g., OpenSearch, vector databases), model gateways, prompt management, evaluation, and tracing (e.g., Arize, MLflow, OpenTelemetry, Datadog)
• Engineering foundation: Python, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes, SageMaker or similar), CI/CD, and a sound approach to security and data privacy
• Agentic systems (preferred): Experience with agent frameworks and runtimes, tool use and MCP, workflow orchestration, and isolation of agent execution
• Judgment: Ability to separate durable foundations from hype and make build‑vs‑buy calls with evidence as the model landscape shifts
• Soft skills: Great communication skills, an empathetic approach to teamwork, and the ability to prioritize tasks in a high-performance development environment

Hiring Locations

We currently hire exclusively in the locations listed below. Select jobs may have more specific location requirements due to business needs.

United States

Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington

APAC

Hong Kong

EMEA

United Kingdom

Benefits Snapshot

• Twice yearly team offsites for in-person collaboration
• Paid flexible time off policy
• Paid parental leave and benefits
• Employer-supported retirement contributions, varying by country
• Monthly phone and internet reimbursement
• Company-sponsored learning and development resources, department budgets for professional development, and a robust onboarding program
• Various options for medical, dental, and vision insurance

Travel

Occasional travel is required for Ontra employees, including typically at least twice per year to attend team and larger group off-sites for in-person collaboration. For some roles, additional travel may be required based on the requirements of the role and business need.

Inclusivity

Ontra is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, Ontra will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact [e-mail].

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Note on Employment Verification: All employees hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in their particular location.