Engineering Manager

Location - New York, NY (On-site)

On-site role requiring five days per week in-office at 7 World Trade Center in New York City.

Compensation

$250,000 – $375,000 Base + Competitive Equity

Visa

Open to Visa Transfers (OPT, H1B Transfers) + New H1B and TN Sponsorship

Company Stage

Growth Stage – AI-Native Enterprise Software Company

Industry

Artificial Intelligence, Enterprise Software, ERP, Fintech, SaaS, Business Operations, Cloud Infrastructure, AI-Native Applications

About the Company

Our client is building an AI-native enterprise resource planning platform designed to modernize the way businesses manage core financial and operational workflows.

The company has raised more than $100M from leading investors and is scaling rapidly from approximately 70 employees toward a 200+ person organization.

As an Engineering Manager, you'll join a rapidly growing engineering organization at a critical stage of its development. You'll report directly to the Head of Engineering and manage approximately 20–30 engineers, primarily distributed across Eastern Europe and South America.

This is a highly hands-on engineering leadership opportunity where you'll help build the managerial layer of the engineering organization while remaining deeply technical and continuing to write production code.

You'll establish engineering processes, performance systems, reporting structures, hiring practices, and team organization while simultaneously making architectural decisions, supporting infrastructure migrations, and shipping production software.

What You'll Do

• Lead and manage approximately 20–30 engineers across distributed teams in Eastern Europe and South America
• Build and establish the engineering management layer as the organization scales
• Define and implement engineering processes from scratch
• Establish performance review systems, feedback loops, reporting structures, and team operating rhythms
• Define team structures, pod organization, ownership models, and engineering workflows
• Hire, onboard, mentor, and develop high-performing engineers
• Establish clear performance expectations and engineering metrics
• Provide regular feedback and coaching to engineering team members
• Identify high performers and help develop future technical and engineering leaders
• Work closely with the Head of Engineering on organizational strategy and execution
• Remain deeply hands-on with software development and write production code regularly
• Make architectural decisions across backend systems, infrastructure, and application architecture
• Oversee the migration from AWS infrastructure toward Kubernetes-based infrastructure
• Partner with SRE and infrastructure teams on cloud architecture and reliability initiatives
• Improve deployment velocity and engineering development processes
• Support multiple production deployments and maintain a high engineering shipping cadence
• Review technical designs and architectural decisions
• Help unblock engineers across complex technical and product challenges
• Partner closely with Product on roadmap, prioritization, and execution
• Translate product priorities into clear engineering execution plans
• Drive delivery of major product initiatives
• Balance technical debt, infrastructure work, product delivery, and organizational priorities
• Identify engineering bottlenecks and implement systems to improve team productivity
• Establish engineering metrics and operating mechanisms to measure team performance
• Improve development, deployment, testing, and production processes
• Build scalable engineering processes that can support rapid organizational growth
• Work closely with distributed engineering teams across multiple time zones
• Maintain strong communication and alignment across remote teams
• Make fast technical and organizational decisions in a highly ambiguous environment
• Admit mistakes, learn quickly, and adjust direction when necessary
• Maintain high engineering standards while operating at startup speed
• Collaborate with founders, engineering leadership, product, and other company stakeholders
• Help shape engineering culture as the company scales
• Remain accountable for both engineering execution and team performance

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong backend-heavy software engineering background
• Experience progressing from a strong individual contributor role into hands-on engineering management
• Experience building and scaling engineering teams
• Experience managing or leading engineering teams through periods of rapid growth
• Experience managing approximately 20+ engineers or comparable organizational scope preferred
• Experience working with distributed engineering teams across multiple time zones
• Experience in fast-paced startup or high-growth environments
• Experience establishing engineering processes and organizational structures
• Experience hiring, mentoring, and developing engineers
• Experience defining performance expectations and engineering metrics
• Experience owning engineering execution and delivery
• Strong technical ownership with continued hands-on coding ability
• Experience making system architecture and infrastructure decisions
• Experience working closely with Product on roadmap and prioritization
• Experience operating with minimal structure and high autonomy
• Experience working in environments with rapid deployment cycles preferred
• Experience building products end-to-end at a product-focused technology company
• Experience working in platform, SaaS, fintech, ERP, or enterprise software environments preferred

Technical Requirements

• Strong backend software engineering fundamentals
• Strong Python experience
• Strong experience with Django or comparable backend frameworks
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and backend architecture
• Experience designing production software systems
• Experience with PostgreSQL or comparable relational databases
• Experience with Redis or comparable caching/data systems
• Experience with AWS and cloud infrastructure
• Experience with AWS Fargate or comparable containerized infrastructure preferred
• Strong Kubernetes experience
• Experience with infrastructure migrations preferred
• Experience designing and operating production cloud infrastructure
• Experience with CI/CD systems and modern deployment workflows
• Experience with GitHub Actions or comparable CI/CD platforms preferred
• Experience with React and TypeScript preferred
• Strong understanding of system architecture and technical tradeoffs
• Strong production debugging and troubleshooting capabilities
• Experience working with highly available and scalable systems
• Experience making infrastructure and architecture decisions
• Ability to remain hands-on and write production code regularly
• Ability to review technical designs and code effectively
• Ability to reason across backend, infrastructure, frontend, data, and product systems
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycle and engineering best practices
• Ability to balance engineering quality with rapid product delivery

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical field preferred
• Equivalent practical engineering experience accepted
• Strong computer science and software engineering fundamentals

Soft Skills

• Exceptional leadership ability
• Strong technical ownership
• High agency and strong bias toward action
• Low-ego leadership style
• Strong decision-making ability
• Comfortable making fast decisions with incomplete information
• Willingness to admit mistakes and change direction quickly
• Strong coaching and mentoring skills
• Strong people management ability
• Strong organizational judgment
• Strong communication skills
• Comfortable managing distributed teams across multiple time zones
• Strong ability to establish structure in ambiguous environments
• Strong hiring and talent development instincts
• Strong performance management skills
• Strong stakeholder management ability
• Strong product and business orientation
• Comfortable partnering directly with senior engineering leadership
• Comfortable partnering closely with Product
• Strong ability to unblock engineers and drive execution
• Strong architectural judgment
• Pragmatic approach to technical tradeoffs
• Strong bias toward shipping
• High execution velocity
• Comfortable working in a rapidly scaling organization
• Comfortable remaining hands-on while managing a large engineering team
• Strong ability to prioritize competing technical and organizational needs
• Strong ownership of team and production outcomes
• Comfortable working five days per week onsite in New York City

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $250,000 – $375,000
• Competitive equity package
• Opportunity to join a rapidly scaling AI-native enterprise software company
• Significant ownership over engineering organization and team development
• Opportunity to build the engineering management layer from the ground up
• Direct partnership with the Head of Engineering
• Opportunity to manage and develop a large distributed engineering organization
• Significant influence over engineering culture, processes, and organizational design
• Opportunity to remain hands-on technically while leading a large team
• Exposure to large-scale cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes migration
• Opportunity to shape architecture and engineering strategy
• High-growth environment with significant career progression potential
• Visa transfer support
• New H1B and TN sponsorship available
• Five-day onsite collaboration in New York City

Why Join

This is an opportunity to join a rapidly scaling AI-native enterprise software company at a critical stage of organizational growth.

You'll have the unusual opportunity to build the engineering management layer from the ground up while managing approximately 20–30 engineers and remaining deeply involved in technical architecture and production engineering.

You'll work directly with senior engineering leadership and Product while helping define performance systems, team structures, engineering processes, hiring practices, and technical standards.

At the same time, you'll remain hands-on — making architectural decisions, supporting a major AWS-to-Kubernetes migration, and continuing to write production code in an environment with multiple deployments per day.

If you enjoy building high-performing engineering teams, staying deeply technical, operating with high agency, and creating structure in fast-moving startup environments, this role offers exceptional leadership, technical, and organizational scope.