Senior Manager, Engineering - AI & Automation

• Lead and grow a team of 4-8 automation engineers across US and offshore locations, responsible for designing, building, and operating automation solutions across Finance, Sales/GTM, People & Culture, and shared corporate workflows.
• Serve as a hands-on technical contributor (player/coach) — prototyping AI agents, reviewing architecture, and shipping features alongside your team, particularly in early-stage capabilities where speed matters more than delegation.
• Ship incremental AI-powered features on a regular cadence using Claude, AWS Bedrock, and our internal platform. Your team's primary output is employee-facing AI capabilities - agents that can read, write, and act across enterprise systems through natural language.
• Partner with Product Management to prioritize the automation roadmap, balancing quick wins that demonstrate value with foundational platform investments. You own delivery; the PM owns prioritization. 
• Design and operate LLM-powered automation pipelines - intelligent search, retrieval-augmented generation, and decision workflows that allow employees to programmatically interact with system data through natural language.
• Partner with Data Engineering, Architecture, and platform teams to design and evolve our internal knowledge graph, RAG infrastructure, and enterprise search capabilities. 
• Own the internal AI governance model for corporate systems, including the citizen developer framework - the guardrails, enablement resources, quality standards, and compliance controls that allow employees across the business to build with AI safely. This is a leadership responsibility, not a documentation exercise
• Drive operational excellence across the automation portfolio: sprint execution, CI/CD practices, reliability, SLAs, and data-driven engineering metrics. Build a team that ships predictably and sustainably.
• Stay at the frontier of AI/automation technologies and bring that perspective into how we work. Challenge existing approaches, advocate for modern patterns, and help the broader organization rethink legacy integrations through an AI-first lens.
• Contribute to multi-year strategies for automation and AI governance, lifecycle management, platform consolidation, and deprecation of legacy technologies.

• 10+ years experience in software, automation, or systems engineering roles
• 4+ years management or technical leadership experience with player/coach characteristics
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs - whether that's agentic workflows, retrieval pipelines, prompt engineering at scale, or enterprise AI features. You've shipped something real, not just experimented.
• Integration development skills using iPaaS or custom code connecting enterprise systems via APIs
• Experience building or operating enterprise automations against systems such as Workday, NetSuite, Salesforce
• Experience with AWS or another cloud environment for automation workloads (Bedrock, SNS, SQS, Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge)
• Experience partnering with Product Managers or equivalent business prioritization models
• Experience supporting data programs, data governance and tooling to support data initiatives
• Experience implementing or consuming LLM-based workflows, retrieval pipelines, or enterprise search
• Experience defining execution rituals, backlog management, outcome-based tracking without PM intermediaries
• Experience building and mentoring engineering talent
• Experience defining AI governance frameworks, citizen developer programs, or internal platform standards (preferred)
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field or equivalent practical experience
• Legally eligible to work in the U.S. on an ongoing basis

At Smartsheet, your ideas are heard, your potential is supported, and your contributions have real impact. You’ll have the freedom to explore, push boundaries, and grow beyond your role. We welcome diverse perspectives and nontraditional paths—because we know that impact comes from individuals who care deeply and challenge thoughtfully. When you’re doing work that stretches you, excites you, and connects you to something bigger, that’s magic at work. Let’s build what’s next, together.

Smartsheet is an Equal Opportunity (EEO) employer committed to fostering an inclusive environment with the best employees. It is our policy to provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants in accordance with applicable laws in the US, UK, Australia, Germany, Costa Rica, Japan, Bulgaria, and India. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran or disabled status, or genetic information. 

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