Engineering Manager AI Gateway

We are looking for an Engineering Manager for our AI Gateway team focused on building and scaling the infrastructure that powers unified AI model access across Vercel's platform. The AI Gateway provides developers with a single reliable endpoint to access hundreds of AI models from providers like OpenAI Anthropic Google and more — abstracting away rate limits failovers and provider-specific complexity so teams can focus on building.

As the Engineering Manager you will lead a talented team of engineers responsible for the reliability performance and extensibility of the AI Gateway. You will drive the technical direction and execution of the platform to shape the future of how developers interact with AI at scale.

• Lead and grow a high-performing team of engineers working on the AI Gateway platform fostering a culture of technical excellence ownership and collaboration.
• Drive the architecture and execution of core platform capabilities including unified API endpoints intelligent rate limit management automatic failover mechanisms and provider-agnostic authentication.
• Partner cross-functionally with product AI research and infrastructure teams to define roadmap priorities and deliver high-impact features that improve reliability and developer experience.
• Ensure production-ready reliability for AI workloads at scale maintaining low-latency performance and high availability across providers and regions.
• Champion developer experience — gathering feedback from internal and external developers to continuously improve the Gateway's usability observability and analytics capabilities.
• Engage with the open-source community and align the team's work with Vercel's broader ecosystem including AI SDK and related projects.
• Recruit mentor and develop engineers on the team supporting their growth through regular feedback career development conversations and a healthy team culture.

• 3+ years of Engineering Management experience with a track record of leading and scaling backend or infrastructure engineering teams.
• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience with a strong foundation in backend development APIs and distributed systems.
• Experience with AI/ML integrations API gateways or high-throughput services — particularly concepts like rate limiting caching and intelligent failover.
• Strong proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript; experience with the Vercel AI SDK or similar AI developer tooling is a plus.
• Familiarity with cloud-based and serverless architectures particularly within the Vercel ecosystem.
• A genuine passion for developer experience and a deep appreciation for what it takes to build reliable production-grade infrastructure.
• Experience contributing to or engaging with open-source communities is a plus.

• Competitive compensation package including equity.
• Inclusive Healthcare Package.
• Learn and Grow - we provide mentorship and send you to events that help you build your network and skills.
• Flexible Time Off.
• We will provide you the gear you need to do your role and a WFH budget for you to outfit your space as needed.

The San Francisco CA base pay range for this role is $232000 - $319000. Actual salary will be based on job-related skills experience and location. Compensation outside of San Francisco may be adjusted based on employee location. The total compensation package may include benefits equity-based compensation and eligibility for a company bonus or variable pay program depending on the role. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process. 

Vercel is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race religion color gender expression or identity sexual orientation national origin citizenship age marital status veteran status disability status or any other characteristic protected by law. Vercel encourages everyone to apply for our available positions even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.

What We Do

From solo developers building their first app to the teams behind ChatGPT Shopify and PayPal if it needs to be fast reliable and beautifully built it runs on Vercel. Our platform powers millions of deployments a day. We started with a simple belief: the web should be fast for everyone everywhere. That belief became Next.js. Then a platform. Then the infrastructure layer for the AI-native web.We are backed by the amazing team at Accel and CRV and we're headquartered in San Francisco.