Associate Engineering Manager

SmartBear delivers application integrity for modern tech stacks ensuring continuous measurable assurance that software just works as intended with governance to operate at AI speed and scale. SmartBear offers deep test automation API lifecycle management and observability capabilities. With integrations across the SDLC it sets a new quality standard for application delivery teams.

SmartBear is trusted by more than 16 million developers testers and software engineers across 32000 organizations including 75% of the largest financial institutions and industry leaders such as Adobe JetBlue and Microsoft. SmartBears best-loved brands include Swagger TestComplete Reflect QMetry Zephyr and more. As stewards of a collaborative open source community SmartBear meets customers where they are to make our technology-driven world a better place. Learn more at or follow us on LinkedIn X and Reddit.

At SmartBear you will be part of a dynamic team solving one of the most critical challenges facing modern businesses: ensuring the integrity of software in an AI-driven world. Whether you are working directly with customers driving go to market strategies supporting operations building products or enabling teams your contributions help shape the future of software quality for organizations worldwide. Join us in our mission.

Associate Engineering Manager AI Platform

Product Introduction

SmartBear is leading the charge to productionize the use of Generative AI throughout the software development lifecycle in ways that go far beyond the chatbots proliferating in UIs everywhere. The AI Platform team sits at the heart of this mission owning two critical areas of the product.

First the team builds andmaintainsthe APIs that serve AI capabilities to downstream products acrossSmartBearsportfolio. These APIs sit in front of a secure infrastructure layer responsible for managing calls into Large Language Models (LLMs) handling streaming responses storing conversation history and tracking the cost of AI calls.

Second the team ownsSmartBearsframework for running AI Agents including the security scalability and reliability of the entire Agent execution system. This includes storing runtime data such as when agents are triggered which system user or organizationinitiateda run and capturing raw cost information for downstream reporting and governance.

Role Summary

As an Associate Engineering Manager on the AI Platform team you will balance technical depth withpeopleleadership. You will guide a growing team of engineers drive delivery on foundational AI infrastructure and stay connected to the codebase through architecture reviews technical guidance and hands-on contributions. You bring 24 years of management experience paired witha strong foundationas a practitioner who has shipped production code.

Job Responsibilities

People Leadership

• Manage mentor and grow a team of 6 engineers across varying experience levels fostering a culture of ownership psychological safety and continuous improvement.
• Conduct regular 1:1s performance reviews and career development conversations to support individual growth aligned with team and company goals.
• Activelyparticipatein recruiting and hiring including contributing to the current open engineering role on the team.
• Identifyskill gaps on the team and partner with senior leadership and HR to develop targeted growth plans or address hiring needs.

Technical Oversight & Delivery

• Own the delivery roadmap for the AI Platform team partnering with Product and senior engineering leadership to plan prioritize andexecutemilestones.
• Participate in architecture and design reviews for AI API infrastructure LLM call management streaming history storage and cost tracking systems.
• Providetechnical guidance and review for the Agent framework with a focus on security scalability and reliability including agent execution data and cost telemetry.
• Perform code reviews and uphold high engineering quality standards across the full stack.
• Stay technically engaged with the codebase contributing code whereappropriate tounblock the team or lead by example.
• Identifyand mitigate technicalrisks anddrive resolution of production incidents in partnership with your team.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with downstream product teams who consume the AI APIs understanding theirneedsand translating them into clear technical requirements for your team.
• Collaborate with security infrastructure and data teams to ensure the Agent framework and LLM infrastructure meet enterprise-grade standards.
• Communicate progress risks and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Contribute to the broader engineering culture at SmartBear through participation in cross-team initiatives engineering standards and knowledge sharing.

Skills Required

Management & Leadership

• 24 years of engineering management experience witha track recordof leading teams that have shipped production software.
• Demonstrated ability to coach and develop engineers at varying levels including navigating performance conversations and building growth plans.
• Experience hiring engineers including sourcing interviewing and onboarding.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to tailor technical discussions to both engineering audiences and business stakeholders.

Technical Skills

• Hands-on background as a software engineer with prior experience writing and shipping production code; comfortable reading code contributing to reviews and engaging deeply in architecture discussions.
• Proficiencyin TypeScript and/or Python
• UnderstandingLLM-based architectures and AI/Agent-based systems ( or comparable frameworks); hands-on experience is a strong plus.
• Familiarity with API design and management including RESTful services and modern API concepts such as MCP (Model Context Protocol).
• Experience with cloud infrastructure on AWS and containerized deployments using Docker; able to reasonforscalability and reliability tradeoffs.
• Understandingsecurity principles as they apply to AI systems including secure credential management access control and data handling for multi-tenant environments.
• Familiarity with observability practices: logging monitoring alerting and cost tracking inproduction ofAI systems.
• Experience with NoSQL or vector databases is a plus.

Ways of Working

• Able tooperatewith ambiguity define structure and drive clarity for the team when requirements are evolving.
• Data-informed mindset measures outcomesiterates onprocesses and uses metrics to guide both engineering and team health decisions.
• Comfortable balancing competing priorities across people product delivery and technical quality simultaneously.
• Collaborative andlow-ego; builds trust quickly with peers reports and senior leadership alike.

Why you should join the SmartBear crew:

• You can grow your career at every level.
• We invest in your success as well as the spaces where our teams come together to work collaborate and have fun.
• We love celebrating our SmartBears; we even encourage our crew to take their birthdays off.
• We are guided by a People and Culture organization - an important distinction for us. We think about our team holistically the whole person.
• We celebrate our differences in experiences viewpoints and identities because we know it leads to better outcomes.

Did you know:

• Our main goal at SmartBear is to make our technology-driven world a better place.
• SmartBear is committed to ethical corporate practices and social responsibility promoting good in all the communities we serve.
• SmartBear is headquartered in Somerville MA with offices across the world including Galway Ireland Bath UK Wroclaw Poland Ahmedabad and Bangalore India.
• Weve won major industry (product and company) awards including B2B Innovators Award Content Marketing Association IntellyX Digital Innovator and Built-in Best Places to Work.

SmartBear is committed to creating an inclusive workplace for employees where all individuals are treated with respect and dignity. We are an equal opportunity employer and make employment decisions based on merit qualifications and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race color religion sex national origin age gender disability veteran status sexual orientation or any other protected status under applicable laws. We are dedicated to fostering a workplace that reflects a diversity of thought and experience as well as our values of being smart open driven accountable and curious.

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