Automation Engineering Manager Jobs in El Segundo, CA

Athena (athena.com) pairs world-class leaders with elite executive assistants. It's where some of the most powerful partnerships in the world get built.

Our clients are founders, executives, and leaders whose ambition exceeds their time. Athena is the first company to build a human-in-the-loop executive support system, combining trained Executive Assistants with market-leading AI to help them stay organized, follow through on priorities, and operate at their highest level.

Athena is one of the largest companies in this category, with 3,000+ clients and over $100M in annual run rate. Our clients include Uber, Shopify, and Goldman Sachs.

We are fully global, working across time zones and cultures. Joining Athena means creating something that fundamentally changes how people live and work and brings extraordinary achievement within reach.

We're looking for people who take their work seriously and want to get better at it.

You should be thoughtful in how you approach problems, willing to take ownership, and able to follow through without constant direction. You ask questions when something doesn't make sense, and you care about getting the details right.

You should be comfortable working with people who have high expectations and limited time. That means being clear, responsive, and reliable.

We're also looking for people who are interested in how this role is changing. The way work gets done is in flux between people, systems, and AI. We want people who are curious about that and willing to adapt as technology evolves.

You don't need to know everything on day one, but you should be able to learn quickly and apply what you learn.

The Senior Engineering Manager, Platform will lead the team responsible for Athena's business-critical platform systems across sales, partnership operations, retention, Athena AI operations, billing, and internal workflow automation.

This leader will define technical direction, develop engineers and managers, and partner closely with Product, Operations, Data, Finance, Legal, Sales, and Athena AI. The role requires the judgment to balance near-term business needs with long-term platform architecture, reliability, and maintainability.

The team is building systems such as the Ops Platform, partnership case management and intervention workflows, AI-assisted document generation, onboarding and offboarding automation, shared identity and SSO, sales enablement tools, billing and referral integrations, and stronger monitoring and operational foundations.

• Lead and grow the Platform Engineering team: Manage, coach, and develop engineers and engineering managers; set clear expectations for ownership, technical quality, execution, and collaboration.

• Set platform strategy and technical direction: Define the architecture and roadmap for shared business platforms, workflow systems, integrations, APIs, permissions, and automation capabilities.

• Drive execution across critical initiatives: Translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical plans, milestones, ownership, and measurable outcomes.

• Partner cross-functionally: Work closely with Product, Operations, Sales, Finance, Legal, Data, and Athena AI to design practical systems that reflect real workflows, controls, and edge cases.

• Build reusable systems: Reduce one-off solutions by creating common platform capabilities for workflow orchestration, case management, reporting, role-based access, document generation, and third-party integrations.

• Improve engineering excellence: Strengthen design reviews, testing, release practices, monitoring, incident response, documentation, and production readiness.

• Own operational reliability: Improve alerting coverage, reduce production issue resolution time, and ensure the team learns from incidents and recurring support patterns.

• Measure impact: Ensure platform work is connected to business metrics such as sales conversion, workflow completion, intervention success, operational effort, retention, and system reliability.

• Communicate clearly: Provide concise updates on progress, tradeoffs, risks, and decisions to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

• Leadership experience: 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing engineering teams and at least 2 years leading senior engineers, managers, or multiple workstreams.

• Technical depth: Strong background in backend, full-stack, platform, infrastructure, or enterprise application engineering, with the ability to guide architecture and make sound technical tradeoffs.

• Platform experience: Experience building and operating business-critical platforms involving APIs, integrations, workflow orchestration, stateful business processes, permissions, and complex data models.

• People management: Demonstrated success hiring, coaching, developing, and retaining strong engineers and managers, including effective performance and career management.

• Execution: Track record of delivering complex, cross-functional programs from problem definition through launch, adoption, and iteration.

• Product and business judgment: Ability to understand operational problems, challenge requirements constructively, prioritize based on impact, and connect engineering decisions to business outcomes.

• Operational excellence: Experience improving reliability, observability, incident response, testing, release processes, and engineering productivity.

• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical decisions, risks, and tradeoffs to senior stakeholders.

• Adaptability: Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment with evolving priorities, incomplete information, and high expectations.

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Experience leading internal platforms, operations systems, CRM-adjacent products, case management, billing, or enterprise workflow products.

• Experience with AI-powered products, LLM integrations, agent systems, or AI-assisted workflow automation.

• Experience with authentication, authorization, SSO, role-based access control, and privacy-sensitive workflows.

• Experience integrating systems such as HubSpot, Stripe, Google Workspace, DocuSign, or similar SaaS platforms.

• Experience with workflow engines, state machines, event-driven architecture, analytics, and reporting on operational lifecycle data.

• Experience in a high-growth, globally distributed, or startup environment.

At Athena, we are deeply committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace environment. We provide equal employment opportunities to all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws. We strive to create an environment where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered to contribute their unique perspectives and talents.