Level

Sierra

Engineering Manager, Agent

Sierra is hiring an Engineering Manager, Agent in London, United Kingdom. It pays £240k-£320k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Sierra.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include OpenAI, Clay and prompt engineering.
  • Level lists 209 other open roles at Sierra.

AI in this role

openaiclay
prompt-engineeringragai-agents

About us

Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands — including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank — to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.

We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and a commitment to balancing Family along the way. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.

Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace.

What you’ll do

  • Lead the design and delivery of production-grade AI agents: You’ll manage and grow a team of engineers building highly performant, reliable, and intuitive AI agents that are central, mission-critical, and directly drive Sierra’s growth. These aren’t prototypes—they are powerful, scalable systems running in production environments across industries like finance, healthcare, and commerce. You’ll ensure technical excellence, operational reliability, and high customer impact.

  • Own the Agent Development Life Cycle (ADLC): You’ll guide your team through the full lifecycle—from initial pilot through deployment and continuous iteration—coaching engineers to set and maintain the standard for ADLC best practices. You’ll ensure projects are delivered on time, meet customer needs, and scale effectively in production environments.

  • Partner with large enterprises and cutting-edge startups: You’ll collaborate with leaders at some of the world’s largest enterprises to understand their most pressing business challenges, and guide your team in building AI agents that transform how they operate at scale. You’ll also work with innovative startups in Europe, embedding AI agents across their entire business stack to drive innovation and efficiency.

  • Shape the future of the platform: Your team’s direct work with customers will guide the evolution of Sierra’s core platform. You’ll surface unmet needs, prioritise initiatives, and collaborate with research, product, and platform teams to shape the future of AI agent development and Sierra’s product.

What you'll bring

  • Experience leading engineering teams that build and scale end-to-end production systems

  • Strong technical problem-solving skills and the ability to guide teams through ambiguous, fast-changing environments

  • A leadership style that blends high standards with empathy, fostering both speed and quality

  • Proven ability to work closely with customers and translate business needs into technical deliverables

  • Excellent communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences

  • Degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Even better...

  • AI-related experience (experience developing AI agents a plus).

  • Experience building or deploying AI/LLM systems in production

  • Background as a founder, engineering lead, or startup builder with high ownership and urgency

  • Familiarity with tools for today’s AI agents: eval frameworks, agent tooling, RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering

  • Prior experience with React, TypeScript, and/or Go

  • Experience interfacing with customers or leading technical projects with external stakeholders

Our values

  • Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.

  • Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.

  • Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve.

  • Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.

  • Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.

What we offer

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:

  • Flexible (unlimited) paid time off

  • Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family

  • Life insurance and disability benefits

  • Retirement plan dependent on country of employment

  • Parental leave

  • Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot

  • Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized 

  • Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most

  • Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

Be you, with us

We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.

How we rate this

Engineering Manager, Agent at Sierra rates 88 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Prompt engineeringRAGAI agentsOpenAIClay

Questions you could be asked

  1. How do you structure and test a prompt to get consistent output from a language model?
  2. How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
  3. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  4. What's a project where you used OpenAI hands-on?
  5. Walk me through how you've used Clay in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: Prompt engineering, RAG, AI agents, OpenAI, and Clay. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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