Senior Manager, Engineering

present of AI; United States; On-site; USD 200,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Ontra is seeking a Senior Platform Lead to own the shared search and AI platform that other engineers rely on. You will guide retrieval, model access, evaluation, and agent tooling, balancing roadmap decisions with strong technical leadership.

The role emphasizes hands-on engineering and people judgment, shaping architecture, and coaching engineers through complex projects. You’ll decide what to build vs. buy while ensuring security and data privacy in production LLM workflows.

Qualifications

• Hands-on software engineering experience.
• Experience running a platform used by multiple teams.
• Ability to coach engineers and lead architectural decisions.
• Familiarity with retrieval, evaluation tooling, and agent frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Own and lead the shared search and AI platform used by other engineers.
• Shape roadmap, architecture, and implementation decisions; balance build vs. buy.
• Set quality bars, security, and data privacy considerations for production systems.
• Mentor and guide senior engineers to deliver scalable, reliable platform capabilities.

Skills

Hands-on engineering

Technical leadership

Platform ownership

Coaching engineers

Job description

This role leads the team that builds the shared search and AI platform other engineers rely on, covering retrieval, model access, evaluation, and agent tooling. A strong candidate has years of hands on engineering plus technical leadership, and has run a platform that other teams actually adopted. The work mixes roadmap decisions, architecture calls, and coaching engineers, so both technical depth and people judgment matter.

How it fits the AI era

The role sits at the center of how AI gets used across the company, since the team decides how models are accessed, evaluated, and traced. Much of the judgment stays human: choosing what to build versus buy, setting quality bars, and deciding when a launch should wait. The work is less about writing every model call and more about giving many teams a safe, measurable path to ship AI features.

How it builds AI experience

Someone here would gain deep practice in production LLM systems: routing across models, evaluation with datasets and automated judges, observability, and agent runtimes. Building this at a company that automates legal and compliance workflows for private markets firms means learning how search quality and data privacy play out on real contract and entity data. Those looking to grow into it should get hands on with retrieval, evaluation tooling, and at least one agent framework.

Worth showing

• Platform others adopted
• Search and retrieval depth
• LLM evaluation in production
• Leading senior engineers
• Cloud and security judgment

This is our own read, written from the employer's posting and the company's Spotlight. The employer's posting is the source of truth for the role.

About Ontra

Ontra provides AI-powered software and services that automate routine legal and compliance workflows for private markets firms, per the company.