Senior Manager, Engineering - AI & Automation

Role Description

As a Senior Manager, Engineering (AI & Automation), you will lead a team of engineers focused on shipping AI-powered capabilities to employees on a rapid, iterative cadence. This is a hands-on, tech-leaning leadership role where the primary measure of success is delivery velocity — how quickly and effectively your team puts Claude, AWS Bedrock, and other AI tools into the hands of employees to make them measurably more efficient. You will partner closely with Product Management to own the automation roadmap and with Architecture and Data teams to shape our internal AI infrastructure.

This full-time position reports to the Sr. Director, Development and can be located in our Bellevue, WA office, or you may work remotely from anywhere in the US where Smartsheet is a registered employer.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Partner with Product Management to prioritize the automation roadmap, balancing quick wins that demonstrate value with foundational platform investments.
• Design and operate LLM-powered automation pipelines - intelligent search, retrieval-augmented generation, and decision workflows.
• 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.
• Drive operational excellence across the automation portfolio: sprint execution, CI/CD practices, reliability, SLAs, and data-driven engineering metrics.
• Stay at the frontier of AI/automation technologies and bring that perspective into how we work.
• Contribute to multi-year strategies for automation and AI governance, lifecycle management, platform consolidation, and deprecation of legacy technologies.

Qualifications

• 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.
• 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.

Benefits

• Employer subsidized medical/vision and dental coverage for full-time employees.
• 401k Match to help you save for your future (50% of your contribution up to the first 6% of your eligible pay).
• Monthly stipend to support your work and productivity.
• Flexible Time Away Program, plus Sick Time Off.
• US employees are automatically covered under Smartsheet-sponsored life insurance, short-term, and long-term disability plans.
• US employees receive 12 paid holidays per year.
• Up to 24 weeks of Parental Leave.
• Personal paid Volunteer Day to support our community.
• Opportunities for professional growth and development including access to Udemy online courses.
• Company Funded Perks, including a counseling membership, local retail discounts, and your own personal Smartsheet account.
• Teleworking options from any registered location in the U.S. (role specific).
• Smartsheet provides a competitive base salary range for roles that may be hired in different geographic areas.
• US Base Salary Pay Range: $205,000 — $257,500 USD.