Senior Manager, Engineering - AI & Automation

Corporate Systems Engineering builds and operates the software platforms, integrations, and automations that power Smartsheet’s core business functions across Finance, Sales/GTM, and People & Culture.  Our team owns mission-critical systems and workflows that enable how the company hires, sells, bills, pays, reports, and scales. We operate at the intersection of software engineering, enterprise platforms, and business-critical data, treating internal systems with the same rigor, reliability, and product mindset as customer-facing software.

The AI & Automation team is our frontier - we're building the next generation of how employees interact with enterprise systems using agentic AI, large language models, and cloud-native automation. This isn't traditional IT. This is product-minded engineering applied to internal tools, with the mandate to fundamentally change how our employees work.

As a Senior Manager, Engineering (AI & Automation), you will lead a team of engineers focused on shipping AI-powered capabilities to employees on a rapid, iterative cadence. This is a hands-on, tech-leaning leadership role where the primary measure of success is delivery velocity — how quickly and effectively your team puts Claude, AWS Bedrock, and other AI tools into the hands of employees to make them measurably more efficient. You will partner closely with Product Management to own the automation roadmap and with Architecture and Data teams to shape our internal AI infrastructure.

This full-time position reports to the Sr. Director, Development and can be located in our Bellevue, WA office, or you may work remotely from anywhere in the US where Smartsheet is a registered employer.

You Will:

• Lead and grow a team of 4-8 automation engineers across US and offshore locations, responsible for designing, building, and operating automation solutions across Finance, Sales/GTM, People & Culture, and shared corporate workflows.
• Serve as a hands-on technical contributor (player/coach) — prototyping AI agents, reviewing architecture, and shipping features alongside your team, particularly in early-stage capabilities where speed matters more than delegation.
• Ship incremental AI-powered features on a regular cadence using Claude, AWS Bedrock, and our internal platform. Your team's primary output is employee-facing AI capabilities - agents that can read, write, and act across enterprise systems through natural language.
• Partner with Product Management to prioritize the automation roadmap, balancing quick wins that demonstrate value with foundational platform investments. You own delivery; the PM owns prioritization. 
• Design and operate LLM-powered automation pipelines - intelligent search, retrieval-augmented generation, and decision workflows that allow employees to programmatically interact with system data through natural language.
• Partner with Data Engineering, Architecture, and platform teams to design and evolve our internal knowledge graph, RAG infrastructure, and enterprise search capabilities. 
• Own the internal AI governance model for corporate systems, including the citizen developer framework - the guardrails, enablement resources, quality standards, and compliance controls that allow employees across the business to build with AI safely. This is a leadership responsibility, not a documentation exercise
• Drive operational excellence across the automation portfolio: sprint execution, CI/CD practices, reliability, SLAs, and data-driven engineering metrics. Build a team that ships predictably and sustainably.
• Stay at the frontier of AI/automation technologies and bring that perspective into how we work. Challenge existing approaches, advocate for modern patterns, and help the broader organization rethink legacy integrations through an AI-first lens.
• Contribute to multi-year strategies for automation and AI governance, lifecycle management, platform consolidat