Mentor and develop a high retention team of engineers. Build the conditions where strong people do their best work and stay.
Partner with founders on hiring, onboarding, and career development as the engineering org grows beyond its founding core.
Own planning and delivery across multiple initiatives. Hold the bar on quality and system design without slowing the team down.
Connect engineering to product and customer needs. Make sure the team is building the right things, not just building things well.
Build operating rhythms that actually help — lightweight and practical for a team that doesn't need heavy process to produce.
Contribute to architectural decisions and long-term platform investments that support scale without accumulating debt.
Stay close to customer facing engineers. Understand the real world problems the platform is solving and make sure solutions reflect that.

5+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years managing engineering teams in a startup or high-growth environment
A track record of shipping complex technical work and developing the engineers around you
Strong technical judgment — you can go deep on architecture and system design when it matters
Experience building engineering culture, not just org charts — ownership, accountability, and craft over process
Excellent written communication; comfortable in an async-first environment where decisions are documented and context travels in writing
A customer-centric instinct and genuine interest in how the platform performs in production
Experience with AI-native products, developer tools, infrastructure platforms, or agent-based systems is a strong plus
Nice to Have:
Background in developer tooling, APIs, or cloud infrastructure
Experience in customer-facing engineering organizations
Early engineering leadership at a startup (first or second management hire

Founding Engineering Manager

Key skills