Senior Engineering Manager - Agents and Context - Platform

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI. What is The Role The Chat team, part of Elastic’s Agents and Context group, builds the conversational and agentic platform that lets customers chat with and operate on their own data in Elasticsearch. We own the conversation experience, the agent harness and tools, retrieval and citations, streaming, memory, and the evaluation layer that keeps answers grounded and reliable. Everything we ship is production software that other Elastic solutions build on. As Senior Engineering Manager you will lead a distributed team of approximately 12 engineers building this platform. Every engineering team at Elastic is led by a trio of Product Manager, Technical Lead and Engineering Manager. You will directly manage the engineers on the team, act as its primary project manager, and work with the PM and Tech Lead to define and deliver the roadmap. This is a people and delivery leadership role in a fast-moving space: the right person is energized by shaping structure where there is little, and keeps a calm, direct style while priorities shift. Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. As a result, our team is diverse and distributed across continents. The ability to lead a distributed team is critical. What You Will Be Doing • Own delivery of the Chat roadmap: break it into milestones, see around corners on risk, and make sure the team ships predictably. • Run hiring end to end for the team: job descriptions, interview loops, sourcing with Recruiting, and onboarding. • Coach and develop engineers at every level, with regular 1:1s, clear expectations and honest feedback. • Run performance management with consistency: promotions, development plans, and managing underperformance through to resolution. • Partner with the Tech Lead and PM to shape roadmap and priorities, and with data science, UX, and the other Agents and Context teams on shared primitives and quality signals. • Build and improve team process (planning, async communication, release and on-call practice) through consensus and clear writing rather than top-down mandate. • Represent the team to leadership and stakeholders. What You Bring • A proven track record as an established engineering manager of software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, promotions and performance management. • A track record of delivering large, multi-team software initiatives in a distributed, async-first environment, including creating or improving team processes. • Previous hands-on software engineering experience as a senior contributor, with enough technical depth to understand a TypeScript/Node/React stack, an Elasticsearch-backed system, and how LLM-powered products are built and evaluated. You will not write production code, but you need to spot bottlenecks, risks and one-way-door decisions. • Familiarity with LLM applications, ideally including RAG, agents and tool use, evaluation, and prompt and context engineering. • Experience with Elasticsearch, Kibana, search and information retrieval, or open source communities is a plus. • Product acumen: comfortable with ambiguity, able to set and communicate priorities, and genuinely interested in what makes an agentic product good for users. • Excellent written and verbal communication. Clear, concise long-form writing is how this te