Manager, ML Engineering at Smarsh in Bangalore

Job description

Who are we? Smarsh empowers its customers to manage risk and unleash intelligence in their digital communications. Our growing community of over 6500 organizations in regulated industries counts on Smarsh every day to help them spot compliance, legal or reputational risks in 80+ communication channels before those risks become regulatory fines or headlines. Relentless innovation has fueled our journey to consistent leadership recognition from analysts like Gartner and Forrester, and our sustained, aggressive growth has landed Smarsh in the annual Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing American companies since 2008. We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead and grow the Cortex team. This is a hands-on leadership role: you will manage a talented team of ML and delivery engineers, drive technical delivery of AI service initiatives, and help define the direction of Smarsh's AI platform capability. You will report directly to a Senior ML Engineering Manager based in the UK and will be the primary engineering leader for the Cortex team on the ground in Bangalore. You will work closely with Smarsh's Applied Machine Learning team — who build and train our in-house models — as well as Product Management, Technical Program Management (TPM), the Fabric platform organisation, and sister Cognition teams: Cognition Logic and Cognition Analytics, all part of the wider Enterprise Conduct organisation. This is a hybrid role based in our Bangalore office, with the expectation of 3 days per week on-site. This role is AI-first. You will be expected to champion and actively use AI-powered engineering productivity tools — including Windsurf and Claude Code — and embed these practices into the team's day-to-day ways of working What You Will Do Team Leadership & People Management • Lead, mentor and grow a team of 4 ML Engineers and 1 Delivery Engineer across India and the UK. • Run effective 1:1s, performance conversations, and career development planning. • Foster a high-trust, high-performance team culture grounded in continuous improvement. • Manage hiring, onboarding, and team capacity planning as Cortex expands. Technical Delivery & Model Operations • Own end-to-end delivery of Cortex initiatives — from planning and scoping to production release and post-go-live operational support. • Drive delivery of new capabilities including Audio Analytics as a Service, In App Translation and Intelligent Agent Review. • Work closely with the Applied ML team to take in-house models from research handoff through to production-grade deployment — managing integration, validation, and operational readiness. • Own and evolve Cortex's gated model deployment pipeline: ensuring models progress through automated quality gates, shadow mode, canary, and full rollout stages with clear promotion and rollback criteria. • Establish model evaluation and monitoring frameworks — tracking quality, performance drift, and SLO compliance in production. • Maintain and improve Cortex's operational SLOs, reliability posture, and incident response process. • Ensure engineering practices, code quality, and architectural decisions meet Smarsh engineering standards. AI-First Ways of Working • Actively use and champion AI productivity tooling: Windsurf, Claude Code, and similar tools. • Set the standard for how the team leverages AI-assisted development to increase velocity and code quality. • Identify and help to introduce new AI tooling where it adds measurable value to the team. Technical Strategy, Stakeholder Management & Developer Experience • Contribute to the Cortex technical roadmap, working with engineering leadership, Product Management, and TPM to align delivery to business priorities. • Build strong working relationships with the Applied Machine Learning team — acting as a bridge between model development and production AI service deployment. • Partner closely with sister Cognition teams — Cognition Logic and Cognition Analytics — to align on shared platform pa