Senior Engineering Manager, Compass
$226-251.1k
Bonuses and restricted stock units may be provided
Real estate technology platform
Be an early applicant
Real estate technology platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$226-251.1k
Bonuses and restricted stock units may be provided
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help everyone find their place in the world.
Role
Who you are
- Strong Technical Background: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of building scalable developer platforms, APIs, SaaS infrastructure, or centralized backend frameworks
- Direct People Management: 6+ years of experience leading software engineering squads, with proven success managing senior and staff-level engineers, as well as geographically distributed teams
- Fluency in the Generative AI Stack: Deep familiarity with modern LLM application architectures, vector databases, prompt design, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agent orchestration libraries
- Hybrid Team Stewardship: Experience managing a blended team model of full-time employees and contractors, keeping quality bars high while driving execution velocity
- Comfort with Ambiguity: A proven self-starter who can take open-ended business problems and shape them into clear, structured, and phased engineering plans with minimal guidance
- Customer Empathy & Product Mindset: Demonstrated ability to understand the pain points of internal "customers" (non-technical business departments) and package platform capabilities into intuitive, reliable internal products
- Security & Compliance Aptitude: Solid understanding of enterprise security concepts, including IAM, data isolation, encryption, and regulatory compliance standards (e.g., SOC 2, PCI DSS) as they relate to cloud-based applications
What the job involves
- As the Senior Engineering Manager for the AI Platform Team, you will lead the AI Engineering Hub of our newly established Staff AI Enablement Organization
- In this highly visible role, you will bridge the gap between complex infrastructure and real-world business impact
- Your mandate is two-fold: overseeing the Tier 1 Platform Foundation (building reusable, secure AI primitives like agent inference, prompt tuning, and orchestration) and coordinating the Tier 2 Staff Enablement efforts (partnering directly with departments like Finance, Legal, and Transaction Management to deploy deep, domain-specific workflow automations)
- You will manage a lean, high-caliber, hybrid team of full-time Compass software engineers—ranging from Junior to Staff-level —alongside a flexible pool of strategic contractors
- By treating the platform as a product, you will build a secure, unified "AI Platform Flywheel" that protects proprietary company data while systematically cutting operational overhead to capture millions in business efficiency
- Lead and Develop Talent: Directly manage, mentor, and grow a hybrid team of full-time engineers and contractors. Cultivate a high-performing culture through individualized coaching, clear performance standards, and proactive career pathing
- Drive AI Platform Strategy: Formulate and execute the roadmap for foundational AI platform primitives (agent orchestration, LLM gateway, telemetry, secure caching, etc.) in close collaboration with senior leadership and Principal Engineers
- Accelerate Business Enablement: Deeply partner with corporate departments (Finance, Legal, Ops, etc.) to identify automation opportunities, translating operational processes into structured AI integrations that run on your platform primitives
- Enforce Strict AI Governance: Oversee technical design and architecture to ensure all AI tools strictly adhere to information security, data residency, and identity and access management (IAM) guidelines
- Promote Operational Excellence: Establish and monitor clear performance metrics (accuracy, latency, token consumption, and cost observability). Implement robust logging, alerting, and rapid incident response systems
- Balance Strategic Resources: Make critical, data-driven decisions on team structure and resource allocation, deciding when to leverage flexible contractors for short-term velocity versus retaining core technical architecture inside our FTE footprint
- Deliver Compelling Communication: Drive high-level technical and strategic written communication (e.g., system tenets, architectural plans, and project charters) to align multiple cross-functional stakeholders around technical trade-offs
Our take
Compass uses an AI-driven platform to smooth out and speed up the process of buying, selling, or renting property. It functions much like a traditional broker, but employs tech to reduce the time, uncertainty, cost and friction of transactions for buyers, sellers and agents.
It's disrupting a sector so far largely averse to tech innovation, allowing users to close deals in less time than the industry average of 30-45 days. Compass is now the largest independent real estate brokerage in the USA, with over 29,000 agents nationwide.
In 2025, Compass acquired Anywhere Real Estate in a major leap that cements its place among the biggest players in US property. By uniting leading brokerage brands and expanding its agent network on a massive scale, Compass strengthens both its reach and its tech-driven platform. This adds new revenue opportunities, positioning the company to help shape the future of real estate.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
15% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Jul 2019
$370m
SERIES G
Sep 2018
$400m
SERIES F
Total funding: $1.5bn
Company HQ
Midtown Manhattan, New York, NY
Leadership
Robert Reffkin
(Founder & CEO)After 2 years at McKinsey, Robert worked as a Lazard Associate and White House Fellow. They joined Goldman Sachs in 2006, where they worked as VP of Principal Investment before leaving in 2012 to found Compass. Alongside this, Robert ran 50 marathons in 50 states to raise $1 million dollars for for youth education and enrichment programs.
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