API Engineering Manager

Bear Robotics•Redwood City, CA

16d•$210,000 - $262,000

About The Position

The API Engineering Manager leads the team responsible for building and maintaining our internal and customer-facing APIs, integration layers, and backend systems that power our robotics platform. You will manage engineer bandwidth, coordinate cross-team work, and ensure the API layer is reliable, scalable, and well-designed. This role requires strong people leadership combined with deep experience in API architecture and backend systems.

Requirements

8+ years of professional experience in software engineering, with a record of delivering complex projects.
5+ years building backend systems or service APIs.
2+ years leading engineering teams or projects.
Strong experience with API design, distributed systems, scalability, data integrity, and reliability.
Proficiency in Go and Python.
Ideally past work in building cloud APIs for dispersed, customer-deployed hardware
Strong communication and ability to drive clarity in cross-team technical interfaces.

Nice To Haves

Experience in robotics, real-time systems, computer vision, or AI/ML.
Familiarity with startup environments and the ability to thrive in rapid iteration cycles.
Knowledge of ROS, robotics middleware, or simulation tools is a plus.

Responsibilities

Own team capacity and prioritization across all incoming projects and requests.
Work with Directors and TPMs to plan quarterly/yearly API roadmaps and commitments.
Provide clear decisions on scope tradeoffs, sequencing, and resourcing.
Establish and maintain predictable execution and clean escalation paths.
Lead hiring, performance evaluations, career growth, and mentoring.
Drive the design and evolution of the company’s API and backend services.
Partner with TLs on API interface standards, versioning, compatibility, and documentation.
Review major architectural decisions and ensure long-term maintainability.
Promote best practices in testing, observability, reliability, and operational readiness.
Work closely with robotics, product, cloud/backend, and application teams to shape API requirements.
Coordinate cross-team dependencies and identify integration risks early.
Communicate API constraints, sequencing, and technical tradeoffs clearly to product and leadership.