Technical Manager
US$250,000 – US$350,000 / yr base salary
Posted 5 Oct 2026
Advertised as “Technical Lead Manager, AI Platform”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 1+ yrs
- Management level
- People management
- Employment
- On-Site
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | US$250,000 – US$350,000 / yr |
|---|
The Role
We have 20 engineers and more than $100M in ARR, and we're scaling the engineering team roughly 3x over the next year. The AI Platform team is where our data advantage becomes product: it owns the matching, ranking, and agentic systems that decide which recruiter sees which role, which candidate reaches which company, and how much of the hiring process runs without a human touching it.
We're hiring a technical leader to own the AI Platform engineering team. This is a TLM role: you'll manage a pod of Applied AI, ML, and Product engineers while staying deep in the core ML work yourself, from data and model design to the hardest ranking and matching problems. You'll partner closely with product and data science and be accountable for outcomes, not output: match quality, automation rate, and the hiring velocity our systems create for customers. Title (Tech Lead Manager, Technical Director, or Engineering Manager) depends on your experience; the ownership doesn't.
Expect to spend at least a third of your time building, more in the early days. You'll read PRs, review evals, and ship production code yourself, every week, not occasionally. The management load grows as the team does, but the technical bar you set personally is a core part of the job.
What You'll Own
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The team. Hire, coach, and level a pod of applied AI, ML, and Product engineers. We run small autonomous teams with high judgment expectations, and we promote on judgment, not lines of code.
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Core ML, hands-on. The matching, ranking, and retrieval models are yours at the code level: data and labeling strategy, feature and embedding design, model selection, training, and fine-tuning. When match quality plateaus, you're the one who finds the next win.
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The hardest modeling problems. The ambiguous, high-risk ML work that isn't ready to delegate: a ranking model that stops improving, an offline eval that disagrees with production, a cold-start problem with no clean labels. You take these on and ship the fix yourself.
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Matching and ranking. The models at the core of the marketplace: retrieval, ranking, and personalization systems that decide how supply meets demand. Improvements here move revenue directly.
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Agentic systems. LLM-powered workflows and automation that take real work off recruiters, hiring managers, and our own ops team. Reliability matters as much as capability; these systems act on behalf of real businesses.
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Trust & safety. The systems that keep the marketplace honest: fraud and spam detection, submission quality enforcement, and guardrails that keep AI outputs accurate and fair when they touch real candidates and real hiring decisions.