Engineering Manager in San Francisco

About Saris AI. We're a San Francisco, Montreal and Toronto based applied AI startup that's building the future of work in the banking industry. We are tackling a $100 billion/yr problem, doubling every quarter and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with multi-turn AI agentic systems.

Our goal is to tackle the type of automation problems that require long-context reasoning, tool orchestration across legacy systems, and strict compliance loops: the ones without known answers. We've shipped real agents that handle real customer workflows in production. With a growing customer base and live deployments, we're scaling up fast and looking for deeply technical builders who want to have outsized impact early.

Your mission is to:

• Lead a product engineering team building AI-native financial infrastructure for banks and credit unions.
• Own delivery, engineering quality, and the operating cadence for your team.
• Scale the team by hiring, onboarding, and ramping engineers to achieve a consistently high.
• Develop engineers through regular coaching, direct feedback, and individualized growth plans that help people level up and take on bigger roles.
• Partner with Product, ML, and executive leadership on technical strategy and roadmap.
• Establish engineering management best practices across sprint rituals, release processes, and incident response that the org can build on as it scales.

Who You Are:

• 7+ years of engineering experience, including 2+ years managing engineering teams in a product context.
• Strong enough technically to evaluate architecture decisions, guide trade-offs, and get into the code when it matters.
• Fluent in AI/ML systems: You understand LLM behaviour, eval frameworks, and prompt engineering well enough to guide how AI gets built into the product, not just how to use AI tools personally.
• Proven track record of developing team members.
• Execution-focus: you ship, hold the team accountable, manage scope aggressively, and don't wait for perfect information to move.
• Experience building teams or processes from scratch, not just inheriting and optimizing someone else's.
• Comfortable operating with high autonomy in ambiguous, early-stage environments where you'll wear multiple hats.
• Clear communicator who translates technical complexity for stakeholders and business context for engineers.

Bonus Points If You:

• Have shipped AI or LLM-powered systems in production, particularly in a regulated industry (financial services, healthcare, etc.).
• Have experience with eval frameworks, prompt versioning, or ML observability tooling.
• Have hired and built a team from the ground up, owning the full recruiting funnel from sourcing through close.
• Have worked in a Series A / early-stage environment where the playbook didn't exist yet.

Why Join Saris AI?

• Join us in building the future of work for the trillion-dollar banking industry using cutting edge AI technology.
• Join as one of the first engineering leaders — your decisions will define how engineering management works at Saris for years.
• Manage engineers building production AI in regulated finance — your team works with LLMs, evals, and agentic systems where outputs need to be auditable, compliant, and correct.
• Competitive compensation with premium benefits and equity package.
• Work with a stellar team of engineers, builders, and leaders; including repeat YC founders with a successful exit (Ready Education).
• We already have production agents live with revenue-generating customers.