Senior Manager, AI Enablement
Justworks · New York, New York, United States
Who We Are
At Justworks, you’ll enjoy a welcoming and casual environment, great benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and the ability to interact with and learn from leaders in the startup community. We work hard and care about our most prized asset - our people.
We’re helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We’re data-driven and never stop iterating. If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, we’d love to hear from you.
We're united by shared goals and shared motivations at Justworks. These are best summed up in our company values, which are reflected in our product and in our team.
Our Values
If this sounds like you, you’ll fit right in.
About the Role
Justworkers are already using AI to solve problems, build applications, and automate their work. They know their challenges best, and we're building an AI Enablement team to give them the tools, engineering expertise, and support to turn their ideas into reliable, secure, production-ready solutions.
As our Senior Manager, AI Enablement, you'll lead a new team focused on making AI-powered development and automation more accessible across Justworks. You'll start with one senior engineer, help hire another, and build a collaborative environment where both can grow, learn from each other, and do their best work.
Together, your team will own our core employee AI platform, develop purpose-built AI agents and automation, and establish the engineering foundations that help Justworkers build and deploy applications independently. You'll bring together expertise in applied AI, enterprise systems, and software engineering to deliver solutions that make a meaningful difference in how people work.
We're looking for a people-first leader who genuinely enjoys developing engineers and hasn't lost their curiosity for building things. Someone who can guide technical decisions, get hands-on when needed, and knows when to step back and let their team take ownership. You'll lead with trust, coaching, and thoughtful feedback while helping your engineers grow beyond their individual areas of expertise.
This is a new function within IT Services, with a clear mission and plenty of room to shape how it operates. You'll have the opportunity to build a team, establish its culture and technical direction, and make a lasting impact on how Justworkers use technology to get things done.
What You'll Do
Lead and Develop the AI Enablement Team
- Lead, coach, and develop a team of senior engineers with complementary expertise in enterprise AI platforms, integrations, applied AI, and software engineering.
- Establish the team's technical direction, priorities, engineering practices, and delivery processes.
- Remain hands-on with solution architecture, development, debugging, and technical problem-solving.
- Partner with stakeholders across Justworks to understand business needs, prioritize opportunities, and deliver solutions with measurable impact.
- Build a culture of technical ownership, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.
Own and Evolve the Employee AI Platform
- Oversee the administration, integration, reliability, and ongoing evolution of Claude and Cowork as Justworks' core employee AI platform.
- Guide the development of integrations, MCP servers, APIs, and automation that extend platform capabilities and connect AI to enterprise systems.
- Partner with Security, Governance, and other technical teams to establish appropriate controls for data access, authentication, authorization, and responsible AI usage.
- Evaluate emerging AI capabilities and determine where they can improve employee productivity or unlock new workflows.
Build Agentic AI Solutions
- Lead the design, development, deployment, and maintenance of AI agents and applications that solve real business problems.
- Build systems that go beyond conversational AI, enabling agents to interact with tools, execute workflows, and take actions across enterprise applications.
- Establish engineering approaches for agent orchestration, tool calling, context management, error handling, evaluation, and observability.
- Work with business and technical partners to translate opportunities into practical, maintainable solutions.
- Balance rapid experimentation with the security, reliability, and operational requirements of production systems.
Enable Employee-Built Applications
- Help employees successfully develop, deploy, and maintain applications created using AI-assisted development tools.
- Provide technical leadership when employee-built applications encounter challenges involving dependencies, runtime environments, APIs, authentication, deployment, or application architecture.
- Establish reusable deployment patterns, templates, tooling, and CI/CD practices that reduce friction between local development and production.
- Develop engineering standards and guardrails that make secure, reliable application development easier for employees.
- Ensure the team provides targeted engineering assistance without becoming the default owner or support team for every employee-built application.
Drive Education, Adoption, and Continuous Improvement
- Guide the development of office hours, workshops, documentation, and self-service resources that help employees build and operate solutions independently.
- Identify recurring development and deployment challenges and turn them into reusable tools, guidance, or platform improvements.
- Establish meaningful measures of AI platform adoption, agent performance, deployment success, employee enablement, and business value.
- Use employee feedback and operational data to continuously improve the team's capabilities and priorities.
What We're Looking For
- Significant professional experience in software engineering, applied AI, or platform engineering, with enough depth to architect systems, review code, and contribute directly to the team’s technical work.
- A minimum of 4 years managing engineers directly, with full responsibility for hiring, performance, and career development. Tech lead experience alone is not a substitute.
- Demonstrated hands-on experience building and deploying AI-powered applications or agents using modern large language models.
- Strong understanding of agentic AI architectures, including tool calling, agent orchestration, APIs, and integrations with external systems.
- Proficiency in Python or another modern programming language, with the ability to review code, troubleshoot unfamiliar applications, and contribute directly to engineering solutions.
- Experience building and operating production applications, including deployment, dependency management, CI/CD, monitoring, and incident troubleshooting.
- Strong understanding of software architecture, API design, authentication, authorization, and secure development practices.
- Experience with cloud platforms, containerization, and modern application deployment patterns.
- Ability to balance hands-on technical contributions with engineering leadership, prioritization, and team development.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, particularly when working with employees and stakeholders who have varying levels of technical experience.
- A practical approach to AI: focused on solving real problems, improving workflows, and delivering sustainable solutions rather than adopting technology for its own sake.
Nice to Have
- Experience with Claude, Anthropic APIs, Model Context Protocol (MCP), or comparable AI platforms and integration frameworks.
- Experience with agent development frameworks such as LangGraph, Google ADK, or similar orchestration tools.
- Experience establishing internal developer platforms, engineering enablement programs, or self-service development capabilities.
- Familiarity with AI-