Engineering Manager - AI & Technology Transformation

About us

emater is a fast-growing, performance-driven e-commerce company — the parent company behind four DTC brands creating global impact.

Based in Miami, with offices in Armenia and Israel and a team spanning the globe, we handle everything in-house from A to Z: operations, marketing, product development, and customer experience. 

The role 
We are hiring the engineering leader who will run that growth's technical engine: leading our development and data team day to day, and driving the company's AI and technology transformation - not as a side interest, but as the core mandate of the role.

This is a rare version of this job. You will not inherit chaos and guesswork: you inherit a documented company - a partner-endorsed technology roadmap, a written AI platform architecture and decision records, a working cross-brand data warehouse, and AI agents already running in production with real daily users. Your job is to lead the team that turns that plan into compounding results.

What you will do

• Lead and grow the technical team - developers and data engineering, including juniors and interns: 1:1s, growth plans, standards, hiring. This is a player-coach role on a small, talented team - you review architecture and unblock hard problems yourself.
• Own delivery across four Shopify storefronts and the internal platforms behind them — stability, performance, security, and a disciplined path off single-person and single-machine dependencies onto governed company cloud (GCP).
• Drive the AI & automation platform: production LLM agents on an open-source agent framework, a BigQuery data warehouse as the single source of truth, an agent memory layer, and deterministic workflow automation (n8n) - with clear governance: every agent owned, evaluated, and fed from validated data.
• Run the AI-assisted engineering program - the team already adopted AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor) on its own initiative; you make that a shared, standard capability with conventions, licensing, and training.
• Enforce build-vs-buy discipline - check platform capabilities before building, own the SaaS estate rationalization, and reserve in-house engineering for what genuinely differentiates.
• Partner with company leadership - execute and evolve the technology roadmap with the partners and the fractional CTO; communicate clearly in business terms; manage priorities across brands.
  

What we are looking for

• 5+ years in software engineering, including 2+ leading a team - ideally in e-commerce or DTC; you have shipped and operated production systems, not only managed them.
• Hands-on depth in the modern web stack: Shopify (themes, apps, APIs) or equivalent platform experience; JavaScript/TypeScript and/or Python; API design; SQL.
• Real, practical LLM/AI experience: you have built or shipped something on LLM APIs - agents, automation, internal tools - and can reason about prompting, evaluation, cost, and failure modes. You do not need a research background; you need production judgment.
• Cloud operations maturity: GCP preferred (BigQuery, Cloud Run), including access governance, secrets, monitoring, and cost discipline.
• Automation instinct: workflow tools (n8n or similar), an eye for manual toil, and the judgment to know what should be deterministic, what can be agentic, and what must stay human.
• Leadership in our languages: working proficiency in Armenian and English.
• A bonus, not a requirement: DTC growth-marketing context (attribution, pixels, ad-platform APIs), data-visualization tooling on GCP (Looker), experience mentoring interns into engineers.
  

The role is full-time and office-based.

Why this role, why now

The company has already proven that AI multiplies output - our own team built agents that teammates use every day. What it needs is the engineering leader who industrializes that proof: one platform, one source of truth, governed and measured, with a team whose capability grows faster than its headcount. The roadmap is written, the mandate is funded, and the partners are behind it. You will not spend your first year arguing for the transformation - you will spend it leading one.

What we offer

• Paid days off, medical insurance, yearly bonus, wellness benefits, and referral bonuses.
• A collaborative, supportive environment where your ideas and professional growth are highly valued.