Engineering Manager, AI Platform

Affinity is scaling rapidly across new markets and use cases, and we need exceptional leaders to help us deliver on our vision: putting relationship intelligence at every professional's fingertips.

As Engineering Manager for AI Platform, you'll lead and scale a team responsible for developing the foundations of AI features and services within Affinity. This is a technical leadership role where you'll shape the technical roadmap, drive implementation end-to-end, and guide technology and architectural decisions alongside the team.

Your charter is to leverage data and AI techniques to derive actionable insights and enable delightful customer experiences. You'll work with cutting-edge technologies, ship rapidly, and see direct impact on company revenue and growth. We're looking for an experienced Engineering Manager who excels at career development, mentorship, and scaling high-performing ML engineering teams.

What You'll Do

Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Define the technical roadmap for AI feature delivery through cross-team collaboration, from ideation to production
• Own the full ML lifecycle: understanding the current landscape, feature engineering, model construction, deployment, observability, and evaluation
• Advance our approach to distributed systems and services architecture to improve agility, reduce complexity, and isolate logic across different languages
• Drive complex technical, architecture, design, and product discussions

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead, coach, and inspire a team that is building capabilities that are critical to customer and business success
• Run Agile processes including daily standups, sprint planning, demos, and retrospectives
• Scale the team by hiring talented engineers to deliver at high velocity and level up the technology
• Mentor engineers and accelerate their career growth
• Identify gaps and create processes that enables the team to be more efficient and drive their success

Hands-On Contribution & Delivery

• Be an active contributor - you will have opportunities to be hands-on in the platform in order to support your team
• Own delivery of delightful, scalable and reliable capabilities through rapid development cycles
• Monitor quality and performance, answer customer questions, and identify patterns to propose root cause solutions
• Identify and measure the impact of the team’s work on customer outcomes

What You Bring

Required Qualifications

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every qualification. At Affinity, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t perfectly align with the qualifications above, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

• 8+ years in software engineering and machine learning roles, building and delivering scalable applications with large data volumes in cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP), with focus on NLP and/or Computer Vision
• 3+ years in engineering management, providing formal mentorship and coaching.
• Proven experience as an engineer bringing ML products to production or as an Applied Machine Learning Engineer
• Experience working with distributed systems at scale, consuming high volumes of data in batch or real-time for the purpose of building AI data sets
• Experience working with complex SaaS platforms
• Track record of managing technical roadmaps to improve platform performance, reliability, and drive toward a technical vision
• Demonstrated success mentoring junior engineers and advancing their careers
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence across functions
• Strong examples of collaborating with UX engineers, application developers, and product managers to influence roadmaps, UX decisions, and feature prioritization
• Passion for contributing ideas to continuously improve our product and company

Nice to Have

• Experience with Databricks
• Deep familiarity with AWS ecosystem
• Knowledge of LLM ecosystem and prompt engineering techniques for enhancing user experiences
• Experience with Ruby, React, or PostgreSQL
• Background building data-intensive applications

Our Tech Stack

• Frontend: React, TypeScript
• Backend: Ruby, PostgreSQL
• Data Platform: Kafka, AWS SQS, Redis, Databricks, Spark, AWS SageMaker, turbopuffer
• Infrastructure: Terraform, Python for serverless, AWS, Kubernetes (EKS)
• AI/ML: AWS Bedrock, Anthropic (LLM subprocessor)

What you’ll enjoy at Affinity:

• We live our values: As owners, we take pride in everything we do. We embrace a growth mindset, engage in respectful candor, act as playmakers, and "taste the soup" by diving deep into experiences to create the best outcomes for our colleagues and clients.
• Health Benefits: We cover both you and your dependents' extended health benefit premiums and offer flexible personal & sick days to support your well-being.
• Retirement Planning: We offer an RRSP plan to help you plan for your future.
• Learning & Development: We provide an annual education budget and a comprehensive L&D program.
• Wellness Support: We reimburse monthly for things like home internet, meals, and wellness memberships/equipment to support your overall health and happiness.
• Team Connection: Virtual team-building activities and socials to keep our team connected, because building strong relationships is key to succes.

Please note that the role compensation details below reflect the base salary only and do not include any equity, or benefits. This represents the salary range that Affinity believes, in good faith, at the time of this posting, that it will pay for the posted job. 

A reasonable estimate of the current range is $200,000 to $250,000 CAD. Within the range, individual pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant.

At Affinity, we may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools as part of our recruitment process to help screen and evaluate candidate applications. While AI assists our hiring team in managing applications efficiently, it never replaces decisions made by real people. We are committed to fair and transparent hiring practices, and our AI tools are regularly monitored to ensure they support—not replace—human judgment. 

Additional Information:

• This job posting represents an active vacancy that we are currently seeking to fill.