Senior Engineering Manager (Search and Retrieval)

About Workato Workato delivers enterprise infrastructure for the agentic era, redefining iPaaS and helping enterprises unify data, applications, processes, and AI into a single, governed platform. A leader in Enterprise MCP and trusted by 50% of the Fortune 500, Workato’s cloud-native architecture connects every application, data source, and process to power real-time orchestration at scale. With enterprise-grade security and continuous innovation at its core, Workato provides the trusted foundation for organizations to automate with confidence and operationalize AI across the business. To learn more, visit www.workato.com Why join us? Ultimately, Workato believes in fostering a flexible, trust-oriented culture that empowers everyone to take full ownership of their roles . We are driven by innovation and looking for team players who want to actively build our company. But, we also believe in balancing productivity with self-care . That’s why we offer all of our employees a vibrant and dynamic work environment along with a multitude of benefits they can enjoy inside and outside of their work lives. If this sounds right up your alley, please submit an application. We look forward to getting to know you! Also, feel free to check out why: Business Insider named us an “enterprise startup to bet your career on” Forbes’ Cloud 100 recognized us as one of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world Deloitte Tech Fast 500 ranked us as the 17th fastest growing tech company in the Bay Area, and 96th in North America Quartz ranked us the #1 best company for remote workers Responsibilities As Senior Engineering Manager for Enterprise Retrieval, you’ll lead the team building the retrieval layer that grounds Workato’s enterprise AI agents. Your team is a deliberate mix of disciplines — Software Engineers who own the systems side (multi-source connectors, ingestion and freshness pipelines, permission-aware indexing, hybrid retrieval at scale) and AI Engineers who own the applied AI side (embeddings, RAG quality, re-rankers, LLM-driven query understanding, eval rigor). Your job is to make those two crafts compound into a single, world-class team. You’ll own the team’s charter, roadmap, and outcomes — partnering with Product, the Agent Platform team, Security, and leadership to figure out what to build, then building a team that ships it. You’ll spend your time on people, technical direction, and execution — in roughly that order — and you’ll keep just enough hands on the architecture to be a credible technical partner to your engineers. This is a senior management role for someone who has led mixed AI/systems teams before, knows what good looks like in both crafts, and wants to put that experience to work on one of the most consequential infrastructure problems in enterprise AI today. In this role, y ou will also be responsible to: Lead, grow, and develop the Enterprise Retrieval team — hiring, coaching, performance, career growth, and team culture across a mixed group of Software and AI Engineers (target team size 8–12). Set the technical direction for the retrieval layer in partnership with senior ICs — balancing classical IR, vector search, RAG, agent grounding, and the operational realities of enterprise content. Own the roadmap and the outcomes — translate company strategy into quarterly objectives, scope crisply, prioritize ruthlessly, and ship measurable wins on retrieval quality, latency, freshness, and cost. Partner across the org with Product, the Agent Platform team, Security, Connectors, and Infra — your team’s output is upstream of almost every AI agent at Workato. Build a culture of evaluation where retrieval quality, faithfulness, citation accuracy, and end-to-end agent success are measured rigorously and improved deliberately. Raise the bar on craft — code review standards, design review rituals, on-call discipline, observability, and a healthy “evals before opinions” instinct. Coach senior ICs on technical leadership — hel