Software Engineering Manager, Agentic AI

Software Engineering Manager, Agentic AI This role is located in Somerville, MA - We are a hybrid work environment and are in the office 3+ days/per week. Tulip , the leader in AI-native frontline operations, is helping companies around the world equip their workforce with composable, connected apps, leading to higher quality work, improved efficiency, and end-to-end traceability across operations. Tulip’s cloud-native, no-code platform, powered by embedded AI, is driving the digital transformation of industrial environments through composable, human-centric solutions that go beyond disrupting the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) category. A spinoff out of MIT, Tulip is headquartered in Somerville, MA, with offices in Germany, Hungary, Singapore, and Israel. Tulip has been recognized as a World Economic Forum Global Innovator, a 2024 Deloitte Technology Fast award winner, one of Energage’s Top Workplaces USA, and one of Built In Boston’s “Best Places to Work” and “Best Midsize Places to Work.” About the role Your leadership will be the driving force behind Tulip’s next core product experience. In this role, you’ll lead the engineering team building Tulip’s new agent-native app-building product—an effort that will redefine how customers compose, deploy, and operate apps on our platform. You’ll work as the engineering leader alongside product and design, navigate technical tradeoffs around long-running agents, sandboxing, and code execution, and ship something publicly within the first few months. You’ll also help shape how this team operates as a reference point for AI-driven development across the broader engineering org. About you You possess high levels of technical acumen, people management skills, and a keen desire to deeply understand the business value of what you’re building. You’ve honed your technical skills through years of building and delivering SaaS products, and you’re now energized by the chance to build at the edge of what AI models can do. You’re passionate about mentoring engineers and helping them grow, and you bring strong opinions about agent architectures, context management, and building scalable systems. You’re a collaborative, motivated self-starter who leads from the front and brings your authentic self to work. What skills or experience do I need? Experience in building and scaling AI systems in production, including LLM fine-tuning and evaluation, agent orchestration and context management, retrieval pipelines and vector stores, tool invocation and MCPs, guardrails and safety layers, and end-to-end observability for non-deterministic systems 2-3+ years of experience leading software development teams with strong hands-on technical leadership, architecting solutions, and staying close to the code. Experience building and scaling large SaaS products and complex distributed systems Expertise in contemporary tech stacks including React, Node.js, MongoDB, and Postgres, with experience deploying in multi-cloud and multi-tenant environments Hands-on experience architecting systems that integrate agentic and generative AI capabilities, including tool use, context management, sandboxed execution, and long-running workflows Cross-functional leadership with product, design, and customer-facing teams to deliver features end-to-end Strong product-engineering instincts: you can prototype quickly, prune scope, and decide what to ship versus what to throw away Key Responsibilities Own the technical architecture and delivery of Tulip’s new agent-native app-building product Hire, mentor, and grow a senior team capable of operating with high autonomy and quality from day one Establish engineering standards: testing, observability, AI-driven development practices for the team Partner with Infrastructure and other Engineering teams to evolve Tulip’s API surface and runtime so agents have what they need without compromising the existing platform Collaborate deeply with product and design as a product threaded team, w