Agent Engineering Manager

Tolan•San Francisco, CA

4d•Onsite

About The Position

Tolan is an Embodied Companion — a cute AI alien you talk with naturally, like a friend. Tolans have their own personality and preferences, and over time form memories about you, your life, and your shared friendship. We're an experienced team that previously founded Even, acquired for $300M in 2022. Tolan is backed by the designers and founders behind Instagram, Retro, Behance, Vimeo, and Notion. Our team works hard, with an emphasis on autonomy and ownership. We're building together in-person in downtown SF. The Role We're hiring an Agent Engineering Manager to break down ambiguous problems, delegate to agents, review their work critically, and course-correct when things go sideways. This isn't a management position — you won't have direct reports. But you'll need every skill that made you a great engineering manager. You'll design and operate complex agent orchestration systems, develop patterns for human-agent collaboration, and ship real product features primarily through agent-assisted development. This is a role we're creating for the first time as of January 2026. Over the past 3 months we've observed a step-function change in the reliability and capabilities of long-running AI agents. We've re-oriented our own work around this new reality, and our most effective engineers now spend more time orchestrating agents than writing code directly. We're certainly not the only people adjusting to this new reality — Karpathy's recent thoughts resonate with what we've been experiencing.

Requirements

5+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent in engineering management or tech lead roles.
Skilled delegator. You know how to scope work and give feedback that improves output — skills honed managing people, now applied to agents.
Hands-on with AI. You have direct experience with AI coding assistants and agent orchestration.
Strong opinions. You know when to use agents and when to do it yourself.
Thrives in ambiguity. You have a knack for turning fuzzy goals into concrete, executable tasks.
Agent-first mindset. You genuinely enjoy the "managing agents" workflow and see it as the future of building.

Nice To Haves

Have built or contributed to agent orchestration tooling.
Have written publicly about AI-assisted development workflows.
Have experience with long-running, multi-step agent systems.
Left management because you missed building, but still miss the parts of management that were about clarity and leverage.

Responsibilities

Break down ambiguous product problems into concrete, well-scoped tasks for agents to execute.
Delegate to AI agents, review their output critically, and course-correct when things go sideways.
Design and operate complex agent orchestration systems that ship real product features.
Develop and document patterns for effective human-agent collaboration across the team.
Help Tolan's engineering practice evolve as the capabilities of long-running agents continue to improve.