AI Engineering Lead/Manager

Cricut is seeking an experienced AI Engineering Lead/Manager to lead a team that builds and ships AI-powered features across client-facing applications.

You will bring hands-on experience integrating AI capabilities, such as AI image generation, agentic actions, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, into production software used by customers.

This role blends technical leadership, hands-on engineering, and strong business sense: you will partner closely with Product Management to define features and shape the roadmap, then lead your team in turning that vision into reliable, delightful experiences.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of engineers building AI-powered features into client applications, setting technical direction and a high bar for quality.
• Partner closely with Product Management to define AI features and shape the product roadmap, balancing customer value, business impact, technical feasibility, and cost.
• Architect and deliver end-to-end integrations of AI capabilities into client-facing software (e.g., AI image generation, agentic actions and workflows, and MCP-based tool and data integrations).
• Stay hands-on: write, review, and ship production code, and help your team work through the hardest technical problems.
• Evaluate models, vendors, and APIs (hosted and open-source), making pragmatic build-vs-buy recommendations based on quality, latency, cost, and reliability.
• Establish practices for evaluating and monitoring AI features, including evals, quality metrics, guardrails, and user feedback loops.
• Build AI experiences that are safe and trustworthy, addressing content safety, privacy, prompt injection, and responsible AI considerations.
• Collaborate with UX on intuitive interaction patterns for AI features, including handling latency, uncertainty, and failures gracefully.
• Work with data and ML partners to understand model training, fine-tuning, and data pipelines, and translate those capabilities into product opportunities.
• Ship behind feature flags with progressive rollout and kill-switches, validating new behavior with production telemetry before ramping.
• Own the health of AI features through telemetry by tracking adoption, output quality, latency, cost per request, and defect trends.
• Champion agentic coding tools in your team's daily workflow (AI-assisted code review, automated test generation) while maintaining code quality, security, and human oversight.
• Mentor engineers, lead effective code reviews, and foster a culture of learning and experimentation.
• Stay current on the rapidly evolving AI landscape and recommend adoption where it would meaningfully improve our products or team.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of hands-on, professional software development experience in one or more of: Angular, Kotlin, Swift, C#, or Python.
• 2+ years of experience as a technical lead or engineering manager, leading engineers to deliver customer-facing software.
• Proven experience integrating AI-based features into client-facing production software, such as AI image generation, agentic actions, LLM-powered experiences, or MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations.
• Practical experience with AI/LLM APIs and SDKs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Stability AI, or open-source models), including prompt design, tool/function calling, and structured outputs.
• Solid understanding of production AI tradeoffs, including latency, cost, reliability, evaluation, and safety.
• Strong business sense, with a track record of partnering with Product to define features, prioritize a roadmap, and measure outcomes.
• Experience designing and consuming REST APIs and integrating client applications with backend services.
• Experience with automated testing (unit, integration, end-to-end) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience instrumenting applications with telemetry/observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Firebase, or platform-native logging).
• Hands-on, pragmatic use of modern AI engineering tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.).

Benefits

• Competitive Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage
• 401(k) match
• Generous PTO
• Tuition reimbursement
• Yearly lifestyle stipend
• Exclusive employee discounts