Senior Manager, AI Corporate Engineering

📋 Description

• • Lead a small, senior team spanning platform engineering and technical program management, setting clear direction and holding a high bar.
• • Own the AI access layer end to end, including identity and authentication for AI tools, connector and integration allowlisting, tiered permissions by function, and guardrails that make adoption safe by default.
• • Own AI cost engineering, building attribution down to team and individual, right-sizing model selection to actual need, making agent and automation spend traceable, and setting budget thresholds and alerting in partnership with Finance.
• • Own the MCP layer for internal tools end to end, including commissioning, decommissioning, governance, and the downstream impact assessment that has to happen before a migration ships rather than after it breaks.
• • Build the enablement layer that turns adoption into impact, including a skills and agent registry that cuts duplication, an evaluation framework for internal AI usage, and technical enablement on sanctioned tools that goes beyond provisioning access.
• • Write and hold the charter, defining what Corporate Engineering owns, what it enables, and how work enters the team, then convene the cross-functional forum that keeps departmental AI efforts coordinated rather than duplicated.
• • Partner across Engineering, GRC, Security, Data, Finance, and People, coordinating and influencing rather than overriding.
• • How to be successful in this role:
• • Experience standing up an internal AI or developer platform function rather than inheriting a mature one.
• • The ability to hold scope, taking a commitment that was made without scoping or resourcing, landing a bounded first version, and declining the rest without it reading as abdication.
• • Fluency in AI cost engineering, including usage attribution, model right-sizing, token economics, agent cost traceability, and the difference between a hard limit and a useful guardrail.
• • An enablement-first instinct, making something safe to self-serve, and explaining why and offering an alternative path to the same visibility when access is declined.
• • Hands-on technical depth across LLM platform tooling, agent and MCP architecture, identity and OAuth, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code.
• • Comfort building for an audience that is no longer only engineers, including those shipping internal tools who are not developers.
• • Data governance fluency in a regulated environment, knowing what should never enter a prompt, a repository, or a third-party tool, and making that judgment fast without becoming the bottleneck.
• • Comfort operating through influence, with product AI, security policy, data platform, and budget authority sitting in partner organizations.
• • What you can expect as a Vanta’n:
• • Industry-competitive salary and equity
• • Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with 100% of employee-only benefit premiums covered for most medical plans
• • 16 weeks paid Parental Leave for all new parents
• • Health & wellness stipend
• • Remote workspace, internet, and cellphone stipend
• • Commuter benefits for team members who report to the SF and NYC office
• • Family planning benefits
• • Matching 401(k) contribution with immediate vesting
• • Flexible PTO policy, plus 80 hours of Sick Time
• • 11 company-paid holidays
• • Virtual team building activities, lunch and learns, and other company-wide events!
• • Offices in SF, NYC, London, Dublin, Tel Aviv, and Sydney