Senior Manager, Experience Foundations and Experimentation

Autodesk; Portland (OR); Remote; USD 163,000 - 293,000; Full time

Job summary

Autodesk in the United States seeks a Senior Engineering Manager to shape frontend experiences across web, desktop and mobile. You will own engineering foundations, standards, and metrics to deliver fast, secure, and enjoyable user interfaces.

This role requires deep React and GraphQL experience, real-time UI, server-driven and generative UI concepts, and a track record building high-performing teams at scale. You’ll lead through architecture, performance, and developer productivity.

Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science or related field or equivalent work experience.
• 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with 4+ years leading teams at scale.
• Deep React & GraphQL expertise with modern React migration experience.
• Web Vitals & performance rigor in browser rendering and Core Web Vitals.
• Distributed systems mindset with latency budgeting and resilience patterns.
• Real-Time & concurrency experience with WebSockets and similar tech.
• Emergent UI architectures including Server-Driven and Generative UI.
• Passion for infrastructure, tooling, developer productivity, or performance optimization.

Responsibilities

• Transform the UI to a distributed, intelligent node leveraging GraphQL API strategy.
• Coach API teams to deliver optimized payloads for frontend efficiency.
• Transition UI to real-time updates using GraphQL subscriptions, WebSockets, SSE.
• Build resilience: timeouts, retries, circuit breaking, degraded states.
• Set and enforce UI SLOs and budgeting to protect Core Web Vitals.
• Explore SDUI systems for rapid prototyping and A/B testing.
• Prepare rollout of Generative UI with streaming LLM outputs and constrained tool calls.

Skills

React & GraphQL Expertise

Web Vitals & Performance

Distributed Systems Mindset

Real-Time Concurrency

Server-Driven UI & Generative UI

Infrastructure & Productivity

Education

BS in Computer Science or related field

Equivalent work experience

Tools

GraphQL

React

WebSockets

SSE

CRDTs / Local-first sync

Job description

Job Requisition ID #: 26WD101724

Position Overview

Welcome to Autodesk! The world’s innovators, designers, engineers, builders, and creators trust Autodesk to help them design and make a better world for all. Autodesk’s Design and Make Platform empowers everyone, everywhere to design and make anything. From the buildings we live and work in, to the cars we drive and the bridges we drive over. From the products we use and technology we rely on, to the movies and games that inspire us. Everything around us is made using Autodesk software. Autodesk’s leading Design and Make Platform offers customers the technology to help them create the world around us, and the critical insights and data to deliver better outcomes for their business and the planet.

At Autodesk, we celebrate all the real-world problem solvers, creative rebels, and innovators who are driven to improve the reality around us. Because we don’t believe in waiting for progress; we believe in making it. When you’re an Autodesker, you can be your whole, authentic self and do meaningful work that helps build a better future for all. Ready to shape the world and your future? Join us!

We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to transform how we build, iterate, evolve, measure, and experiment with our application experiences across web, desktop and mobile platforms. This leader will own the engineering foundations, and technical standards to make our experiences fast, resilient, secure, collaborative, measurable, and enjoyable by default.

This is not a traditional frontend management role.

The successful candidate will combine deep modern web engineering experience with strong product and design judgment, and will create the capabilities and engineering culture that allow teams to move rapidly from Idea → Prototype → Experiment → Learning → Scaled Experience

Location: United States - Any

Responsibilities

• Transform the UI to an intelligent distributed node. Leverage our GraphQL API strategy fully by replacing numerous, unoptimized sequential API calls with intelligent client orchestration, normalized caching, and batched queries
• Empower the UI engineers to dictate data shapes. Coach the API teams to deliver optimized payloads, ensuring the frontend is not burdened with expensive runtime data assembly or excessive network waterfalls
• Transition the UI to real-time, event-based updates using GraphQL subscriptions, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events (SSE)
• Build resilience into the shared client layer: timeouts, retry with backoff and jitter, circuit breaking, error boundaries and designed degraded states
• Establish strict Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for the UI, explicitly driving improvements in Core Web Vitals. Enforce SLO Budgeting practice at the System design stage to protect these metrics
• Explore Server-Driven UI (SDUI) systems that allow teams to quickly prototype, A/B test, and tweak experiences across different user personas and subscription tiers without waiting on hard client deployment cycles
• Prepare rollout of Generative UI systems. Bind streaming LLM agent outputs directly to design system components via schema-constrained tool calls, dynamically synthesizing bespoke, interactive workflows in real-time

Minimum Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science or related field or equivalent work experience
• 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with 4+ years leading high-performing frontend or full-stack engineering teams at scale
• Deep React & GraphQL Expertise - Production track record porting legacy codebases (AngularJS, Struts) to modern React, combined with advanced GraphQL client orchestration (caching, batching, event-based subscriptions)
• Web Vitals & Performance Rigor - Deep expertise in browser rendering physics, measuring and optimizing Core Web Vitals
• Distributed Systems Mindset - A fundamental understanding of composite latency budgeting, network waterfalls, and client-side resiliency patterns (retries/backoffs)
• Real-Time & Concurrency Experience - Proven experience building highly concurrent, collaborative web applications utilizing WebSockets, local-first state, or similar real-time synchronization techniques
• Emergent UI Architectures - Practical understanding of Server-Driven UI and Generative UI paradigms, including streaming UI components and schema-constrained tool calling
• A passion for infrastructure, tooling, developer productivity, or performance optimization and the ability to drive technical initiatives that improve overall team efficiency and code quality

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in monitoring and improving Reliability of a complex system at scale
• Built multi-user collaborative features: presence, co-editing, CRDTs or operational transformation, or a local-first sync engine
• Built offline-capable clients with persisted caches and mutation queues
• Frontend security depth: content security policy, threat modelling
• AI-assisted development workflows with evaluation discipline, and generative UI rendered from a constrained catalog

Learn More

About Autodesk

Welcome to Autodesk! Amazing things are created every day with our software – from the greenest buildings and cleanest cars to the smartest factories and biggest hit movies. We help innovators turn their ideas into reality, transforming not only how things are made, but what can be made.

We take great pride in our culture here at Autodesk – it’s at the core of everything we do. Our culture guides the way we work and treat each other, informs how we connect with customers and partners, and defines how we show up in the world.

When you’re an Autodesker, you can do meaningful work that helps build a better world designed and made for all. Ready to shape the world and your future? Join us!

Benefits

From health and financial benefits to time away and everyday wellness, we give Autodeskers the best, so they can do their best work. Learn more about our benefits in the U.S. by visiting https://benefits.autodesk.com/

Salary transparency

Salary is one part of Autodesk’s competitive compensation package. For U.S.-based roles, we expect a starting base salary between $163,000 and $292,820. Offers are based on the candidate’s experience and geographic location, and may exceed this range. In addition to base salaries, our compensation package may include annual cash bonuses, commissions for sales roles, stock grants, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Equal Employment Opportunity

At Autodesk, we’re building a diverse workplace and an inclusive culture to give more people the chance to imagine, design, and make a better world. Autodesk is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and considers all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic. We also consider for employment all qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.

Belonging

We take pride in cultivating a culture of belonging where everyone can thrive. Learn more here: https://www.autodesk.com/company/global-belonging

In-Person Onboarding and Identity Verification

This role may require in-person onboarding and/or in-person ID verification.