Senior Manager, Engineering - AI Validation

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About the role

At Sonatus, we’re driving the transformation to AI-enabled software-defined vehicles. Traditional automotive software methods can’t keep pace with consumer expectations shaped by the mobile industry—where features evolve rapidly, update seamlessly, and improve continuously. That’s why leading OEMs trust Sonatus to accelerate this shift. Our technology is already in production across more than 9 million vehicles on the road today and rapidly expanding. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, with 250+ employees worldwide, Sonatus combines the agility of a fast-growing company with the scale and impact of an established partner. Backed by strong funding and proven by global deployment, we’re solving some of the most interesting and complex challenges in the industry. Join us and help redefine what’s possible as we shape the future of mobility. The Opportunity: Sonatus is looking for an experienced Senior Engineering Manager to build and lead our AI Validation function — the team responsible for how we test, evaluate, and govern the AI models and agentic capabilities embedded in our software-defined vehicle and cloud platforms, as well as our cloud-only AI and LLM-based products. You will deeply understand how AI is developed and deployed across Sonatus’s embedded, cloud, and LLM/RAG-driven environments, identify gaps and friction in current validation practices, and turn those insights into scalable test strategy, evaluation frameworks, and governance mechanisms that let Sonatus ship trustworthy AI-driven features at automotive scale. You will lead and grow a high-performing AI validation team and partner closely with engineering, product, and safety stakeholders to make AI quality and safety a competitive advantage. Role and Responsibility: • Define and drive Sonatus's AI validation strategy across embedded, in-vehicle, cloud-connected, and cloud-native AI systems, identifying gaps in model development, testing, deployment, and governance. • Lead, hire, mentor, and grow a high-performing AI Validation organization, establishing scalable engineering processes, technical direction, and execution excellence. • Own the end-to-end validation strategy for AI/ML models, LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agentic AI workflows—from data pipelines and model training through cloud services and in-vehicle deployment. • Architect and operationalize scalable evaluation frameworks and benchmarking platforms for AI systems, including multi-step agentic workflows, using deterministic metrics, LLM-as-a-Judge methodologies, automated regression testing, and production feedback loops. • Design and maintain evaluation harnesses for RAG and agentic systems that measure retrieval quality, grounding, citation accuracy, factual consistency, context relevance, safety, latency, reliability, and execution correctness. • Evaluate, integrate, and optimize open-source and commercial AI validation technologies, driving build-versus-buy decisions for Sonatus's AI quality platform. • Establish AI governance, Responsible AI practices, model lineage, safety guardrails, and compliance processes appropriate for automotive safety-critical systems and enterprise AI products. • Act as the quality gatekeeper for AI-enabled releases, partnering with engineering, product, safety, and OEM stakeholders to identify risks, define release criteria, and ensure production readiness. • Collaborate across engineering teams to define validation strategies for emerging AI capabilities, rapidly prototype new evaluation approaches, and standardize successful practices into reusable frameworks. • Drive continuous improvement by tracking industry advances in AI evaluation, agentic AI, LLM validation, and RAG systems, translating them into scalable validation capabilities across Sonatus. Quali

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