About the role
Scale AI’s Public Sector business is growing quickly as government agencies adopt AI to support critical national security, defense, and public sector missions. We are seeking a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead our Frontier AI Infrastructure team within Public Sector Engineering. This is a 50/50 role : you'll spend roughly half your time writing and reviewing code, and half your time leading, coaching, and growing a small team of engineers. Your team owns the model inference layer — enabling state-of-the-art models, debugging the latest AI tools, managing networking, debugging latency, and tracking pricing/usage metrics for AI models. You'll lead technical discussions on the frontlines with cloud vendors and customers to deliver on critical contracts and debug platform issues, and you'll partner upstream with Product to catch issues before they break, moving the team from "infra-only debugging" to proactive integration testing. You will: As a manager - 50/50 management and hands on coding experience. Lead, coach, and grow a team of engineers — own hiring, onboarding, performance, and career development. Set technical direction and quarterly priorities for the inference layer, and hold the team accountable to delivery on customer and contract commitments. Run the operational rhythm of the team: sprint planning, on-call rotation, incident review, and postmortems. Partner with Product, Program, and Deployed Engineering leadership to translate customer and mission requirement…