Manager, AI Engineering

About SandboxAQ SandboxAQ is a high-growth company delivering AI solutions that address some of the world's greatest challenges. The company’s Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) power advances in life sciences, financial services, navigation, cybersecurity, and other sectors. We are a global team that is tech-focused and includes experts in AI, chemistry, cybersecurity, physics, mathematics, medicine, engineering, and other specialties. The company emerged from Alphabet Inc. as an independent, growth capital-backed company in 2022, funded by leading investors and supported by a braintrust of industry leaders. At SandboxAQ, we’ve cultivated an environment that encourages creativity, collaboration, and impact. By investing deeply in our people, we’re building a thriving, global workforce poised to tackle the world's epic challenges. Join us to advance your career in pursuit of an inspiring mission, in a community of like-minded people who value entrepreneurialism, ownership, and transformative impact. The Opportunity The SandboxAQ AI team is looking for a hands-on Manager, AI Engineering to help us build the future of agentic collaboration, trust and ROI. Our goal is to make agents work well on their own, in teams, and with humans. This includes the following aspects: • Security : Discovery of agents, evaluation, red teaming, monitoring, guardrails, etc. • Quality : Measuring ROI of agents and suggesting improvements • Collaboration : Bringing humans and agents together into one place with shared context A successful candidate thrives at the intersection of AI and software engineering. You deeply understand how models and agents work, how they can fail, how they can be protected and improved. You have hands-on experience with agents in production, know what works and what doesn’t, know the latest trends and you’re opinionated about the future. You know what you don’t know and enjoy learning to close those gaps. You’ll turn your insights and innovation into real world features baked into our platform - shipping code to production. This is a hands-on leadership role where you’ll break things, fix them and then harden them for good while also leading a small team of engineers. At the same time, you’ll have freedom to explore, collaborate, publish, and deploy, shaping the field of agentic collaboration and trust from all angles. You will help set technical direction, raise the quality bar, mentor team members, and ensure that the team moves quickly from research insight to real-world product impact. We’re looking for somebody with the curiosity of a researcher, the rigor of an engineer, and the creativity of a hacker. You will be part of a diverse team consisting of ML experts, security experts, mathematicians, and software engineers, each playing a key role in efficient and effective enablement of the cutting-edge technologies being developed at SandboxAQ. Key Responsibilities • Lead and grow a small, highly technical team while remaining deeply involved in hands-on engineering and research. • Set technical direction, break down ambiguous problems, establish practical plans for fast, high-quality execution, and build a culture of ownership, low-ego collaboration, thoughtful experimentation, and high standards. • Create new agentic capabilities, including frameworks for monitoring, guardrailing, and evaluating agents, while staying current on the latest agentic developments and identifying new opportunities. • Perform classical ML tasks, including exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, and model fine-tuning, and rapidly iterate on prototypes and features based on feedback and evolving product needs. • Work closely with Product and Research to translate AI research into applicable features and software engineering pro