Eng Manager
On-siteSan Francisco, California, United States or Palo Alto, California, United States
Job Summary
Own all engineering output: product quality, velocity, reliability, and security. Build the engineering team from current size to 15–20 in 12 months, personally involved in every hire. Set and enforce a shipping culture with weekly demos, continuous deployment, and minimal process overhead. Partner directly with the CEO on product direction, prioritization, and customer-facing technical conversations. Architect and evolve the platform (LLM orchestration, agentic workflows, compliance automation) for enterprise scale. Establish lightweight but real engineering practices: CI/CD, observability, on-call, and code review standards.
Required Qualifications
- Builder first, manager second
- Founder DNA
- Prior experience as a technical founder or very early engineering leader (employee #1–10) at a startup that shipped real product under real constraints
- Proven ability to scale a team from small to 20+
- Hired 10–20 engineers in a compressed timeline without lowering the bar
- System for how to source, close, and onboard fast
- Personal network of strong engineers in the Bay Area
- AI-native mindset
- Actively building with LLMs, agents, tool-use, and orchestration frameworks today
- Understanding of prompt engineering, evaluation, context window management, and the difference between demo-ware and production-grade AI systems
- Experience with agentic architectures
- Shipping velocity as a core value
- Measure engineering health by what's in production, not what's in Jira
- Set aggressive timelines and hold the team to them
- Know how to unblock engineers, kill unnecessary process, and create a culture where deploying daily is normal
- Deep, not wide
- Go deep on specific systems
- Debug production issues at 2am
- Explain architecture tradeoffs to a customer on a sales call
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 8+ years of software engineering experience
- At least 3 years in a technical leadership or founding engineering role at a product-led company
- Demonstrated experience scaling an engineering team from small to 20+ engineers
- Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain senior technical talent
- Deep, hands-on experience shipping AI/ML or agentic systems to production at enterprise scale
- Strong written and verbal communication skills
Desired Qualifications
- Ideally they have a personal network of strong engineers in the Bay Area they'd bring with them or recruit from
- Experience with agentic architectures
- Background in security, infrastructure, or enterprise SaaS
- Operated in a domain where correctness matters (fintech, security, health, compliance)
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