Engineering Manager, AI Products

With our growing customer base and our expansion into new markets and use cases, we have more to build than ever at Affinity as we execute on our vision to put relationship intelligence at every professional's fingertips.

Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you will be leading and scaling out a team that oversees the development of AI features and services of the core Affinity CRM product. You will help define the technical roadmap and implementation for the future of our product and services and functionality end to end. This is a very hands-on role; in addition to leading the team, you'll also be an active contributor.

The charter for this role is to leverage data and AI techniques to derive insights and package them as services while making sure the end experience is delightful. We leverage cutting-edge technologies, and are quick to ship as our features have a direct impact on the revenue and growth of the company. We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager who values career development, mentorship and will support the team as we scale. We’d love to see a track record and accomplishments in leading high-performing ML engineering teams. 

What you’ll be doing:

• Through cross-team collaboration, define the technical roadmap for the features and functionality that make up for our AI feature delivery. This will comprise ideation to production, including feature engineering, model construction, deployment, and model observability and evaluation along while having a measurable impact on our CRM customers.
• Advance our use of microservices to improve agility, complexity and isolation of logic and failures while supporting different languages. For example, our app is written in Ruby and ML services leverage Python. 
• Lead Agile processes like daily standups, sprint plannings, demos and retrospectives to ensure successful delivery of projects.
• Lead, coach, mentor and inspire a team that owns applications that are critical to the success of our customers and our business.
• Own the delivery of a delightful, reliable user experience to our users around the world through rapid cycles of development and iteration.
• Be an active contributor. You’ll have the time to build meaningful features alongside your team.
• Be responsible for customer experience. You will lead the monitoring of bugs and answering customer questions. You’ll also identify patterns to propose technical improvements that will address the root cause.
• Drive complex technical, architecture, design, and product discussions.
• Identify and fill gaps on the team, and create the processes necessary for the team’s success.
• Scale the team by hiring additional talented engineers to provide the necessary velocity to meet the team’s goals.

Qualifications

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every qualification. At Affinity, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t perfectly align with the qualifications above, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Required:

• You have 8+ years of experience in software engineering roles, building scalable applications with large volumes of data in any cloud-based environment like AWS, Azure, GCP.
• You have 3+ years in an engineering management role, providing mentorship and coaching in a formal setting.  
• You have past experience as an engineer in bringing ML products to production or as an Applied Machine Learning Engineer.
• You have experience working with complex SaaS platforms.
• You have excellent communication skills.
• You have experience managing a technical roadmap, to improve a platform's overall performance and reliability and build towards a technical vision.
• You have a track record of mentoring junior engineers and helping them advance in their careers. 
• You're excited to work collaboratively within engineering and across functional teams e.g., UX engineers, application developers in our CRM team and product managers. You have exceptional examples of influencing roadmaps, UX decisions, and feature prioritization that result in successful product delivery.
• You’re eager to contribute your ideas and experiences to help Affinity continuously improve as a product and company.

Nice to have:

• Experience with Databricks.
• Experience with the AWS ecosystem.
• Familiarity with the LLM ecosystem, prompt engineering techniques etc for improving user experiences.
• Experience working with Ruby, React, or PostgreSQL.
• Experience building data-intensive applications.

Tech stack

Our platform is built with React and TypeScript on the front end, and with Ruby and PostgreSQL on the back end. Our data platform utilizes Kafka, AWS SQS, Redis, Databricks, Spark, and AWS technologies such as SageMaker. Our infrastructure is deployed using Terraform and Python for serverless and is hosted on AWS and runs on Kubernetes (EKS).  We use Anthropic as a subprocessor for leveraging LLMs.

How we work:

Our culture is a key part of how we operate as well as our hiring process:

• We iterate quickly. As such, you must be comfortable embracing ambiguity, be able to cut through it, and deliver incremental value to our customers each sprint.
• We are candid, transparent, and speak our minds while simultaneously caring personally with each person we interact with. 
• We make data-driven decisions and make the best decision for the moment based on the information available.

Join us in enabling every professional on the planet to succeed by harnessing the power of their relationships.

If you’d want to learn more about our values click here.

What you’ll enjoy at Affinity:

• We live our values as playmakers, obsessed with learning, care personally about our colleagues and clients, are radically open-minded, and take pride in everything we do.
• Health Care coverage and flexible personal & sick days. We want our team to be happy and healthy :)
• We provide an annual budget for you to spend on education and offer a comprehensive L&D program – after all, one of our core values is that we’re #obsessedwithlearning! 
• We support our employee’s overall health and well-being and reimburse monthly for things such as; Transportation, Home Internet, Meals, and Wellness memberships/equipment.
• Virtual team building and socials. Keeping people connected is essential.

Please note that the role compensation details below reflect the base salary only and do not include any equity or benefits. This represents the salary range that Affinity believes, in good faith, at the time of this posting, that it will pay for the posted job.   

A reasonable estimate of the current range is $142,300 to $215,000 CAD. Within the range, individual pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant.