Engineering Manager, Applied AI

Job Description Who We Are Motive empowers the people who run physical operations with tools to make their work safer, more productive, and more profitable. For the first time ever, safety, operations and finance teams can manage their drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet related spend in a single system. Combined with industry leading AI, the Motive platform gives you complete visibility and control, and significantly reduces manual workloads by automating and simplifying tasks. Motive serves nearly 100,000 customers from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses across a wide range of industries, including transportation and logistics, construction, energy, field service, manufacturing, agriculture, food and beverage, retail, and the public sector. Visit gomotive.com to learn more. About The Role We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead and grow our Applied AI team. This team consists of AI engineers who leverage bleeding-edge models to build intelligent, agentic experiences that automate and optimize the world of physical operations. Our vision is to empower our users with agents that can faithfully actualize their intentproactively ensuring safety, streamlining complex logistics, and boosting productivity through open-ended interactions with real-world data. You will lead, grow, and support a team in solving many open problems in applied AI, including: - Designing and empowering agents to interpret complex sensor data (video, telematics) and navigate the physical world. - Building the orchestration infrastructure to bridge on-device (edge) and server-side AI for seamless, real-time decision-making. - Developing systems for proactive intervention, turning reactive alerts into automated resolutions. - Designing optimal modes of interaction that allow users to delegate complex operational tasks to AI agents. What You'll Do - Provide engineering leadership for a team building the next generation of AI agents for physical operations. - Provide domain expertise and sharp technical and product intuition to guide the team's system architectures and product roadmaps. - Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, and robust testing for agentic systems operating in complex environments. - Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing and rapidly growing engineering team, overseeing hiring, onboarding, and career development. - Collaborate closely with Product, Research, Hardware, and application teams to deliver strategic objectives that redefine what's possible in our industry. - Guide the team in making sound tradeoffs and prioritization decisions to deliver user value with velocity. What We're Looking For - Proven experience managing engineering teams that deliver complex, high-quality AI/ML products at scale. - Strong product intuition and a passion for user experience excellence, especially in agentic or automated systems. - Strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack and hands-on technical experience with frontier models. - Excellent collaboration and communication skills to effectively coordinate across diverse teams and stakeholders. - Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects. - 8+ years of experience in software development, with significant time spent in AI/ML domains. - 2+ years of engineering management experience, with a track record of recruiting, growing, and retaining high-caliber talent. Bonus Points - Experience developing and/or deploying agent-based systems. - Familiarity with MLOps, real-time data processing, or IoT/embedded systems. - Experience with multi-modal models (video, time-series, language).3 Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is one of Motive's core values. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice here . UK Candidate Privacy Notice here. The applicant must be authorized to receive and access those commodities and technologies controlled under U.S. Export Administration Regulations. It is Motive's policy to require that employees be authorized to receive access to Motive products and technology.