Engineering Manager, AI Platform

Job description

StubHub is on a mission to redefine the live event experience on a global scale. Whether someone is looking to attend their first event or their hundredth, we’re here to delight them all the way from the moment they start looking for a ticket until they step through the gate. The same goes for our sellers. From fans selling a single ticket to the promoters of a worldwide stadium tour, we want StubHub to be the safest, most convenient way to offer a ticket to the millions of fans who browse our platform around the world. StubHub is hiring an **Engineering Manager, AI Engineering** to lead the engineering team building the infrastructure, platforms, frameworks, and AI-powered solutions that are helping StubHub become an AI-first company. This is a technical and organizational leadership role for someone who can turn rapidly evolving AI capabilities into reliable products and systems, create clarity in a highly ambiguous space, and build a high-performing engineering team. You’ll help shape and execute StubHub’s AI engineering strategy, enabling teams across the company to use AI safely and effectively at scale to improve productivity, quality, and business operations. *Location: Aliso Viejo, CA* **About the Team:** AI Engineering is StubHub’s AI Center of Excellence, responsible for building and operating the shared infrastructure, platforms, frameworks, and engineering foundations that enable teams across the company to use AI effectively and safely. The team’s mission is to make StubHub an AI-first company by turning AI into a reliable force multiplier for employees and, ultimately, the customers they serve. The team works across the AI technology stack, from foundational platform capabilities and reusable frameworks to end-to-end AI-powered solutions. This includes building the systems that allow teams to develop, evaluate, deploy, and operate AI capabilities reliably at scale, as well as solving high-value problems directly where AI can materially improve productivity, quality, or operational efficiency. AI Engineering serves teams across StubHub. In some cases, the team builds and owns AI solutions end to end; in others, it provides shared platforms, reusable capabilities, technical guidance, and engineering partnership that enable teams to build effectively themselves. The goal is not simply to introduce more AI tools, but to create durable capabilities that multiply the impact of teams throughout the company. **Why This Role Matters:** AI is becoming an increasingly important part of how StubHub builds products and operates its business. Realizing its potential requires more than experimentation: it requires strong engineering leadership capable of turning emerging technology into reliable systems, focusing investment on the highest-leverage opportunities, and helping a talented engineering team execute effectively. You’ll provide dedicated engineering leadership for this work while partnering closely with senior leadership and senior technical contributors to help shape and execute StubHub’s AI roadmap. You’ll be accountable for the effectiveness of the engineering team—creating clarity around priorities, strengthening execution, developing engineers, and balancing foundational platform investments with high-value AI solutions. The impact extends well beyond this team. Better AI infrastructure, products, and engineering practices can help StubHub employees deliver higher-quality work faster, improve the efficiency and quality of business operations, and shorten the path from idea to customer impact. **What You’ll Do:** - **Lead a high-performing AI engineering team:** Establish clear expectations, coach engineers across career stages, develop senior technical leaders, manage performance thoughtfully and directly, and create an environment where talented engineers can do their best work. - **Turn ambiguity into execution:** Translate rapidly evolving AI capabilities and company needs into achievable engineering plans, clarify ownership, manage dependencies, make thoughtful tradeoffs, and drive predictable delivery. - **Build the foundations for AI at StubHub**: Guide the development and operation of shared AI infrastructure, platforms, and frameworks that enable teams to build, evaluate, deploy, and operate AI-powered solutions safely and efficiently. - **Deliver end-to-end AI solutions:** Lead engineering efforts that apply AI to high-value problems across the company, from identifying the opportunity through building, evaluating, deploying, and improving production solutions. - **Increase organizational leverage:** Determine where AI Engineering should build and own a solution, partner deeply with another team, or create reusable capabilities and guidance that allow teams to become increasingly self-sufficient. - **Raise the quality bar for AI systems:** Establish strong engineering practices for evaluation, reliability, safety, observability, and production readiness rather than treating successful prototypes as finished products. - **Remain technically engaged:** Partner closely with senior leadership, Staff engineers, and technical leads on architecture, system design, engineering tradeoffs, and technical quality while preserving strong technical ownership within the team. - **Measure meaningful impact:** Use adoption, satisfaction, productivity, experimentation, delivery, and user-impact signals to understand where AI investments are creating value and guide future investment. - **Partner across StubHub:** Work with engineering leadership, technical leaders, and teams across the company to understand their problems, prioritize opportunities, and translate AI capabilities into practical business outcomes. **What Success Looks Like:** - A high-performing engineering team with clear ownership, consistent coaching, strong accountability, growing technical leadership, and increasing impact per engineer. - More predictable execution across shared AI infrastructure, platform capabilities, and high-priority AI initiatives, even as technologies, requirements, and dependencies evolve quickly. - Increased adoption and satisfaction with AI capabilities, supported by evidence that employees are completing meaningful work more effectively. - Faster experimentation and shorter idea-to-customer cycles as teams gain access to reliable AI platforms, frameworks, and reusable capabilities. - Strong production quality across AI systems, including reliability, evaluation, observability, extensibility, and appropriate safeguards. - A scalable operating model in which AI Engineering focuses its direct ownership on the highest-leverage problems while enabling other teams to use AI effectively and independently. - Senior and Staff engineers retain meaningful technical ownership while benefiting from a management partner who aligns technical direction, organizational priorities, and execution. **What We’re Looking For:** - 7+ years of software engineering experience, including meaningful technical ownership of complex production systems. - 3+ years of direct people leadership experience, with meaningful ownership of hiring, coaching, performance reviews, promotions, performance improvement, and difficult talent decisions. - Experience leading technically strong engineering teams across a range of career levels, including partnering effectively with Senior and Staff-level engineers. - Strong technical judgment and recent experience participating in system design, architecture, and engineering-quality decisions; regular coding is not required. - Experience building or operating AI-powered products, developer platforms, engineering productivity systems, or other technically complex platform capabilities in production. - Practical understanding of modern AI systems, including areas such as LLM-powered applications, agents, orchestration, evaluation, observability, reliability, and appropriate safeguards. - Demonstrated ability to distinguish promising prototypes from production-ready systems and establish the engineering practices required to operate AI capabilities reliably at scale. - Proven ability to work from first principles, create direction without a complete playbook, prioritize ruthlessly, and deliver in a fast-moving technical environment. - Experience balancing foundational platform investments with immediate product or business needs and making thoughtful build, partner, and enablement decisions. - A track record of building high-performing teams, delivering candid feedback, developing engineers and technical leaders, and maintaining a consistently