AI Engineering Manager (Core AI Platform)

Front•San Francisco, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Front is the leading AI-powered customer service platform built for collaboration. Front brings core support channels into a modern, intuitive workspace where teams can collaborate on requests, automate manual processes, and delight customers across their entire lifecycle. Front’s flexible workflows, AI features, and customer intelligence provide the efficiency and insights to keep entire organizations customer-first, every day. More than 9,000 of the most innovative companies worldwide including CultureAmp, HootSuite, and Y Combinator use Front to deliver five-star service at scale. Backed by Sequoia Capital and Salesforce Ventures, Front has raised $204M from leading venture capital firms and independent investors including top executives at Atlassian, Okta, Qualtrics, Zoom, and PagerDuty. Front has received numerous Great Place to Work accolades, including Built In's 100 Best Midsize Places to Work in SF 2025, Top Places to Work by USA Today 2025, Y Combinator's list of Top Companies in 2023, #4 on Fortune’s Best Workplaces in the Bay Area™ ,Inc. Magazine's 2022 Best Workplaces list, and Forbes Best Startup Employers 2022 List. Over 9,000 companies rely on Front to run their customer operations. AI is reshaping what's possible in this space, and Front is building the platform to deliver on that promise. At the center of this effort is our Core AI Platform team - a group of our strongest applied AI and engineering talent whose work underpins every AI-powered experience across the product. We're looking for an engineering leader to own this team and its outsized impact on Front's product and customers. The Core AI Platform team is responsible for three things: Building and maintaining the foundational AI infrastructure (LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, evaluation systems) that all product teams at Front rely on Enabling product feature teams to ship AI-powered experiences quickly and reliably by providing well-abstracted, production-grade AI capabilities Pushing the frontier on AI techniques and tooling so Front stays ahead of the rapid pace of change in AI/ML To be successful in this role, you will manage a team of senior AI engineers - both applied AI and full-stack AI specialists - to deliver on an ambitious technical roadmap. You will guide strategic AI investments by evaluating emerging techniques and directing effort toward the highest-impact bets. You will lean in on technical design and architecture, scale the team by attracting top AI talent, and drive the processes that let a platform team serve many product teams effectively. This is a highly collaborative role where you will partner closely with product managers, other engineering managers, and engineers across the organization.

Requirements

Deep technical fluency in AI/ML systems, particularly LLM-based applications, with the ability to evaluate trade-offs and guide architectural decisions alongside senior engineers
Track record of managing and scaling a team of senior/staff engineers through ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces
Proven ability to guide strategic AI investments - evaluating emerging techniques, making build-vs-buy decisions, and directing team effort toward the highest-impact bets in a rapidly evolving space
Strong cross-functional partnership skills to align AI platform capabilities with product needs across multiple teams
Ability to attract, develop, and retain top AI engineering talent in a competitive market
Experience building and operating AI/ML infrastructure or platform services in production at scale

Nice To Haves

Founded or built a new team/function/capability from early stages
Experience at a B2B SaaS company applying AI to enterprise workflows
Background in developer experience or internal platform work that accelerated other engineering teams

Responsibilities

Own the technical roadmap for Front's AI platform, guiding strategic investments in AI by evaluating emerging techniques, making build-vs-buy decisions, and partnering with product and engineering leadership to prioritize the highest-leverage capabilities
Drive architectural decisions on AI infrastructure - LLM orchestration, RAG systems, model evaluation, prompt management - ensuring reliability, scalability, and developer ergonomics
Manage and grow a team of senior engineers, providing mentorship and career development while maintaining a high talent bar
Define and improve the interfaces between the AI platform and product feature teams, enabling autonomous and efficient execution across the organization
Contribute to engineering-wide initiatives as a member of Front's engineering management team

Benefits

Competitive salary
Equity (we are post-series D & backed by some of the best VCs in the US)
Private health insurance, including plan options at no cost to employees
Paid parental leave
Flexible time off policy
Flexibility to work from home Monday and Friday, unless posted as a fully remote role
Mental health support with Workplace Options
Family planning support with Maven
$100 per month Lifestyle Stipend to spend on fitness, health and wellness, and other activities
Wellness Days - Fronteers get an additional day off on months with no holidays
Winter Break - Our offices are closed from Christmas to New Year's Day!