Engineering Manager, ChatBots and AI

Workato is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the ChatBots and AI team within our Platform organization. This is a high-ownership role for someone who thrives in ambiguity: you turn unclear requirements into clear execution plans, make confident decisions with incomplete information, and keep both the team and leadership aligned. The team is fully remote and international - you'll build the processes and culture that make it work at pace.

About the Team

The ChatBots and AI team's mission is to deliver AI agents to end users. We own the runtime and integration layer - conversation storage, API design, streaming, and integrations with external interfaces like Slack and other applications. The team is made up of Senior and Staff engineers working in Ruby/Rails and Go on a modern stack: PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, and AWS. You'll collaborate with dedicated QA, SRE, and UX/UI teams, as well as engineering teams across the broader organization. Workato has a strong cross-functional culture - your team won't work in isolation.

What You'll Do

Delivery

• Partner with Product Managers and stakeholders to scope projects, set timelines, and define what success looks like

• Plan and track execution across quarters and sprints; deliver on schedule without compromising quality

• Identify blockers early, resolve them decisively, and escalate when escalation is the right call

• Balance feature work against internal investments - AI-SDLC, CI/CD, platform upgrades, and technical debt

Team

• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of Senior and Staff engineers

• Own hiring, onboarding, and performance management

• Design team processes that fit a distributed, asynchronous environment - and evolve them as the team and company change

• Apply AI tooling to how the team works, not just what it builds

Technical Ownership

• Participate in architecture and design decisions as a technical peer to your engineers

• Make trade-off calls on scope, approach, and sequencing - and be accountable for them

• Understand the system deeply enough to allocate the team's capacity where it matters most

Communication

• Keep leadership informed on progress, risks, and blockers with clarity and without spin

• Build working relationships with peer leads across engineering and product

• Represent your team's priorities and constraints in cross-team planning

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years managing engineering teams, including Senior and Staff-level individual contributors

• Senior engineer-level technical depth - you can read the code, challenge a design, and hold your own in an architecture discussion

• Hands-on background in backend engineering; experience with Ruby, Go, or comparable languages and distributed systems

• Demonstrated ability to operate under ambiguity: defining direction where none exists, and committing to decisions before all the information is available

• Track record of shipping complex software on schedule in a fast-moving environment

• Experience managing a fully remote, distributed team across multiple time zones

• Strong written communication - in an async environment, writing is the primary management tool

Nice to Have

• Experience building AI-powered products - agents, LLM pipelines, or orchestration systems

• Background in platform, integration, or developer-facing infrastructure

• Experience scaling a team through periods of rapid growth

• Familiarity with enterprise SaaS or automation platforms

(REQ ID: 2941)