Senior Engineering Manager - AI Platform

About the Opportunity

Join Contentful’s AI Applications Platform team as a Senior Engineering Manager (f/m/d) and play a pivotal role in shaping the next generation of AI-powered capabilities that are embedded directly into Contentful’s product experiences.

Our AI Applications Platform team builds application-platform capabilities
— reusable components, reference implementations, etc..—that product teams across Contentful use to ship AI-powered features quickly and safely.

This is a product-facing platform role: you will stay close to user needs (internal builders and sometimes end customers), focus on developer experience and adoption, and ship iteratively. This role is not focused on running infrastructure (SRE), database operations, or security operations.

In this role, you will help drive two critical areas of our AI strategy:

• Empowering customers and internal teams to build accurate, trustworthy, and governed agentic solutions that are easy and intuitive to adopt.
• Providing enterprise-ready access to LLMs that enables product teams across Contentful to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable AI-powered features.

This is an excellent opportunity for an engineering leader with a strong background in web and application development who enjoys building reusable capabilities while staying close to product delivery, user needs, and cross-functional collaboration. Your work will amplify Contentful’s ability to bring innovative AI solutions to market by scaling impact across multiple teams and business functions.

• Lead and scale high-performing engineering teams building AI application-platform capabilities used across Contentful’s products.
• Set and maintain a technical vision for developer-friendly
  , reusable tools and components that help feature teams ship AI-powered experiences reliably.
• Drive initiatives around modular AI actions, streaming experiences at the product layer
  , developer-facing debugging and run insights, and traceability features that help teams meet regulatory and transparency requirements.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Engineering leaders to align strategic roadmaps and deliver measurable business value.
• Serve as a consultant and enabler for product teams by delivering reusable, well-documented platform components and guiding successful adoption.
• Ensure AI capabilities are intuitive to adopt, secure by design, and governed through product-level guardrails and patterns.
• Guide teams through the full lifecycle: discovery, design, implementation, rollout/adoption, iteration, and continuous improvement.
• Recruit, mentor, and coach team members to foster technical and leadership growth.
• Act as a thought partner to senior leadership, helping shape Contentful’s long-term AI strategy and how AI capabilities are delivered through product experiences.
• Promote responsible AI development practices, including ethics, bias mitigation, transparency, and privacy-by-design.
• Monitor market and technology trends and evaluate emerging tools and methodologies for practical product impact.

• 5+ years of experience in technical leadership, specifically managing software engineering teams; strong experience building shared product-platform capabilities (APIs/components) used by multiple teams.
• Proven track record delivering high-quality software and platform capabilities for internal and external customers.
• Deep engineering background including cloud architectures, containerization, and scalable APIs.
• Demonstrated ability to abstract complex AI technologies (LLMs, RAG, integrations) into usable, compliant, and extensible platform features.
• Strategic, data-driven thinking in translating business requirements into effective technical execution.
• Advanced stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Experience embedding governance, compliance, and privacy (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, AI transparency requirements) within development practices.
• Outcome-oriented and pragmatic; focused on delivering tangible business impact and customer value.
• Entrepreneurial mindset; comfortable with ambiguity and change.
• Commitment to professional development and team growth.
• Excellent…