Engineering Manager, Frontier AI Infrastructure - Public Sector

About the Role

Scale AI’s Public Sector business is seeking a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead our Frontier AI Infrastructure team within Public Sector Engineering. This is a 50/50 role where you will spend roughly half your time writing and reviewing code, and half your time leading, coaching, and growing a small team of engineers.

Your team owns the model inference layer — enabling state-of-the-art models, debugging the latest AI tools, managing networking, debugging latency, and tracking pricing/usage metrics for AI models. You will lead technical discussions with cloud vendors and customers, and partner upstream with Product to catch issues proactively.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and grow a team of engineers: own hiring, onboarding, performance, and career development.
• Set technical direction and quarterly priorities for the inference layer, holding the team accountable to contract and customer commitments.
• Run the operational rhythm of the team: sprint planning, on-call rotation, incident review, and postmortems.
• Partner with Product, Program, and Deployed Engineering leadership to translate customer requirements into a roadmap.
• Represent the team in customer engagements and vendor escalations, including with government stakeholders.
• Design and implement secure, scalable backend systems for Public Sector customers using cloud-native AI infrastructure.
• Own services and systems alongside your team, define long-term health goals, and improve surrounding components.
• Stay in the code: review PRs, debug production issues, and take on meaningful technical work.

Requirements

• At least 1-2+ years of direct people management experience leading software engineers (hiring, performance management, career development), plus a strong track record as an individual contributor.
• At least an active Secret clearance, with the ability and willingness to up-level to TS/SCI with CI Poly.
• Willingness to remain hands-on in the code.
• Ability to support work 3–4 days a week from the Washington, DC office.

Nice to Have

• Full Stack Development proficiency across frontend, backend, and databases; experience delivering software to air-gapped or isolated environments.
• Cloud-native technologies: understanding of containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Security-focused background with federal compliance frameworks (e.g., Cloud SRG, FedRAMP, STIG Benchmarks).
• Experience building or scaling a small team and setting enduring engineering standards.

Interview & Application Notes

• Scale policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role.