Software Engineering Manager

At Hasbro, our mission is to entertain and connect generations of fans through the wonder of storytelling and exhilaration of play. We’re looking for adventurous and curious people who want to explore, experiment, and innovate to come up with the best ideas. Our culture has inspired our diverse team of highly skilled, highly creative, and highly committed individuals for 100 years and we believe the best is yet to come.

We’re building something new inside our AI Studio, and we’re looking for a Software Engineering Manager to help shape it with us. This role sits at the center of a new and constantly evolving business area. The problems are still taking shape, and the systems are actively being built. What excites us is the opportunity to push the boundaries of what stories and characters can be and to use technology to bring iconic IP to life in ways never before imagined.

We work where storytelling, imagination, and technology converge. Our focus is on defining and building the core systems that transform characters and worlds from something audiences watch into something they can interact with and engage over time.

This role helps build both a new technical foundation and a new team. Working closely with a small group of senior engineers, creative partners, and brand leaders, this Software Engineering Manager will deliver work that is visible, impactful, and foundational to how we bring characters to life. Success here means turning ambiguity into reliable, scalable technology-and building the organization that can sustain and grow it. This is an explicitly hands-on role, especially early on, where getting into the platform and shipping code is as important as growing the team around it.

What You’ll Do

In this role, the work is both technical and organizational. Near-term, that means contributing directly: architecting systems, writing/reviewing code, establishing practices that hold as the team scales, and driving continuity. Longer-term, it means building and managing the team itself: recruiting, shaping the technical roadmap, and partnering across product, creative, and business to define what comes next.

You will:

• Architect, build, and ship features for our AI-powered character platform – including LLM service integrations, REST APIs, and the tooling that lets internal and external partners configure and deliver character experiences.
• Establish engineering foundations: CI/CD pipelines, code review standards, observability practices, on-call runbooks, and deployment processes that can hold as the team scales.
• Integrate with LLM providers (OpenAI, Google Gemini), voice services (ElevenLabs for TTS, AssemblyAI for STT), and real-time delivery infrastructure (LiveKit) to power live character interactions.
• Recruit, onboard, and build a team of engineers organized around dedicated product areas as the portfolio expands.
• Partner with the Principal AI Engineer and product leadership to shape technical strategy, make build-versus-partner decisions, and represent engineering direction across business and creative stakeholders.
• Measure outcomes, identify gaps, and continuously improve both delivery practices and team structure based on what you learn.

What You Will Bring

• 3+ years of hands-on software engineering experience shipping production web applications, with 1-2+ years in a tech lead or engineering management role.
• Production experience on AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, RDS, S3, and ECS) and proficiency in Node.js and/or Python.
• Direct experience integrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, etc.) in a production context. Understanding how these systems behave at scale is essential, not a bonus.
• A track record of building and operating REST APIs consumed by external teams or partners, with attention to versioning, access control, and reliability.
• Experience establishing or improving CI/CD pipelines, deployment practices, and observability tooling (Datadog or equivalent) in a cloud environment.
• Strong communication skills – the ability to represent engineering decisions clearly for product, business, and creative stakeholders who may not share the same technical context.
• Comfort leading in spaces where the structure is still forming, priorities shift quickly, and the right answer requires asking good questions.
• Experience managing and mentoring engineers through growth or transition, with genuine interest in developing people alongside the product.

Extra Credit

• Experience with real-time communication systems (WebRTC, WebSockets, etc.).
• Familiarity with voice AI services, including text-to-speech (TTS) and/or speech-to-text (STT).
• Exposure to prompt engineering, RAG architectures, or evaluation frameworks for LLM-powered systems.
• Background in entertainment, gaming, consumer products, or IP-driven development.

We are an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer

Hasbro is committed to equality of opportunity in all aspects of employment. We are committed to making all employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, marital status, or any other legally protected status.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. If you have a disability and require assistance in this application process and need to request an accommodation, please contact your recruiter or coordinator.