Senior Engineering Manager, AI Sim

SandboxAQ is a high-growth company delivering AI solutions that address some of the world's greatest challenges. The Engineering Manager will lead a multidisciplinary team of backend generalists responsible for core functionalities and drive the technical strategy for the AI Simulation platform's development.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and Mentor: Grow a high-performing team of backend engineers, managing career development and fostering a culture of continuous growth and humility
• Orchestrate Execution: Manage sprint ceremonies and planning meetings to align team efforts with strategic product goals, maintaining a tight feedback loop between engineering and end-users
• Maintain quality: manage tech debt to an appropriate level in a fast-moving, early stage product. Constantly evaluate the tradeoff between building durable, hardened software and scrappy prototypes
• Disentangle dependencies and schedules: Manage delivery, scheduling, and timelines to optimize predictability of delivery
• Drive technical decision-making: Own the technical direction and architectural discussions for the AISim simulation and data platform, ensuring solutions are maintainable, scalable, and secure. Maintain coordination with other engineering teams where technical decisions have cross-team impacts
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work closely with researchers, product managers, and internal stakeholders to translate complex scientific requirements into clear technical deliverables and implementation plans
• Maintain Technical Excellence: Remain hands-on with code reviews and critical design decisions, establishing best practices for CI/CD pipelines, API design, and cloud infrastructure

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering industry experience including at least 4 years in a management role with a proven track record of remaining technically hands-on while leading and growing engineering teams
• Proven track record of shipping high quality software with sustained high velocity and predictability
• Experience leading teams building early-stage products, and making staffing, technical, and other planning decisions in such an environment
• Deep understanding of software design principles, architectural patterns, and building cloud-based SaaS products
• Strong experience with GCP (or another major cloud provider) including networking, compute, and container orchestration
• Demonstrated ability to manage complex data systems, including knowledge of ORMs, schemas, and transactional vs. analytic databases
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence cross-functional teams and translate customer requirements into high-impact solutions
• Domain experience in drug discovery, cheminformatics, or advanced materials, particularly applying AI/ML systems to these scientific fields
• Experience building compute and data platforms for scientists that orchestrate large amounts of compute, data, training, and inference
• Background in supporting secure enterprise deployments in regulated or security-sensitive environments