Engineering Manager
Engineering Managers at AI companies lead engineering teams across the delivery cycle—hiring and developing engineers, setting technical direction in collaboration with senior ICs, owning roadmap and execution, and partnering with product and design counterparts. The work is the standard engineering management craft: 1:1s and growth conversations, architecture reviews and technical trade-off decisions, on-call and incident response, and translating cross-functional priorities into team plans. Technical scope varies widely—some EMs run platform and infrastructure teams, others run product engineering, others run ML or research-adjacent teams—but the canonical role is recognizable across software companies generally, with AI workloads as the specific domain rather than a different management discipline. These managers typically sit within engineering organizations as first-line or second-line leaders, reporting to directors or VPs depending on team size.
Measured across 259 of 261 open postings.
This role is advertised at 4 levels, so a single figure for the role would describe none of them. Experience and pay are the midpoints for each level on its own.
| Level | Share | Median years | Median pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Senior | 8%(22) | 6 | — |
| Staff / Principal | 5%(13) | 8 | — |
| Manager | 77%(200) | 6 | $305k |
| Director | 9%(23) | 10 | — |
A dash means too few postings stated it to report a midpoint. Most companies do not publish a salary band, so pay is indicative rather than a market rate. 1 level with fewer than 10 open postings is not shown.
“Demonstrated experience applying LLMs or AI agents to real production problems”
“Production Python expertise with experience in modern ML/AI frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, HuggingFace, OpenAI API)”
“Lead, manage, and grow a team building AI-native artifact creation experiences”
“work directly with customer engineering teams to tailor deployments to their needs”
Requirements are a share of every open posting, so a role missing from this list is one where almost nobody asks. Work mode is different: many postings never say, so that figure counts only the ones that do. A posting stops being advertised when it is filled, cancelled or reorganised, so read the last figure as how long these stay on the market, not as time to hire.
Share of new postings expecting AI in the person's own work, by the week they appeared. Measured on the same 124 companies throughout, every one of them tracked since 18 May, so the line is not moved by us adding companies.
Line is a four-week average; dots are individual weeks, 14 postings each on average. Weekly values span 53 points across this window, so read the line, not the gap between two dots. Across this window the share has been broadly flat.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Distributed systems architecture
Technical program management
Incident response and reliability
Backend and API engineering
Cloud infrastructure operations
Monitoring and observability
Systems performance optimization
Infrastructure automation and IaC
Full-stack product engineering
Developer platform engineering
Security engineering
Product strategy & roadmapping
Data pipeline engineering
AI and GPU infrastructure operations
Agent system architecture and development
Technical team leadership and mentoring
Cross-functional collaboration
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
261 open Engineering Manager jobs across 67 companies.
Other Engineering roles
General-purpose software engineering roles focused on building and maintaining software systems. Covers generalist SWE positions that don't clearly fall into frontend, backend, fullstack, or other specialized tracks.
Engineers focused on server-side systems, APIs, services, and data processing pipelines. Includes roles explicitly labeled as backend or server-side development.
Engineers specializing in user-facing interfaces, web applications, and client-side development. Includes UI/UX engineering and web development roles.
Engineers working across the entire application stack, handling both frontend and backend responsibilities.
Engineers building and maintaining internal platforms, cloud infrastructure, compute systems, and developer tooling.