Engineering Manager - Core Infra

Cinder•New York, NY

16h•Onsite

About The Position

Cinder builds the infrastructure that keeps the world's most important digital platforms true to what they stand for. When a platform needs to write moderation policies, route content to reviewers, run AI agents against abuse, file NCMEC reports, or measure how their safety programs are performing, they use Cinder. Our customers are some of the largest internet platforms in the world. The decisions made in our software directly determine what stays up, what comes down, and how users are treated. We're a small engineering team. You and your team will ship features that go live to enterprise customers within days, not quarters, and you'll hear directly from the people using what you built. Cinder’s Core Infrastructure team builds the platform and infrastructure that judges the safety of much of the user-generated content on the internet. This journey requires extreme focus and ruthless prioritization. We have talented engineers working across agents, workflows, review tooling, platform reliability, and data, but execution quality and prioritization still depend too much on individuals self-managing their priorities rather than teams that run themselves. We're hiring an Engineering Manager to own the Core Infra team end to end: to set clear priorities, raise the bar on execution quality and speed, and turn a group of strong ICs into a team that self-organizes around problems. Management is the heart of this role, but it isn't a process-only job. Most of your time will go into leading, coaching, and unblocking your team, while you will stay close enough to the code to contribute directly, lead architecture discussions credibly, and earn your engineers' trust as a technical peer. You'll report to our Head of Engineering and have real influence on how we build out engineering leadership as the org scales.

Requirements

8+ years building production software with at least 4 years in a startup environment, managing platform engineers directly.
Owned a team's delivery, not just your own, and grown ICs into stronger engineers.
Deep familiarity with high-throughput, data-intensive systems, workflow/automation engines, or AI-powered platforms in production, with experience managing full stack engineers.
A track record of turning a group of individual contributors into a high-performing team: clear priorities, shared ownership, and execution that doesn't depend on any one person.
Strong enough technically to earn your team's trust. You can lead architecture and trade-off discussions, review work credibly, and jump into the code when it helps.
Fluent and opinionated about how AI tooling changes the way teams build.
Experience setting roadmaps and priorities in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment, and the judgment to decide what to deprioritize, not just what to do.
A real point of view on what high-performing engineering teams look like and how to measure them, with experience driving reliability, quality, or operational metrics like DORA.
Give direct, constructive feedback as a matter of course, and deliver it in a way people can act on.
Clear written communication. We're a distributed team concentrated in NYC and we work closely with customer-facing teams. You write clearly in PRs, Slack, planning docs, and cross-functional updates.

Nice To Haves

Experience in Trust & Safety or abuse prevention.
Understanding how attackers exploit platforms gives you a head start.
Experience operating at the Product ↔ Engineering boundary, or in a customer-facing engineering capacity.

Responsibilities

Own the health, direction, and delivery of the Core Infra team.
Set clear priorities and a roadmap your team understands.
Raise the bar on team-level execution quality.
Build a team that self-organizes.
Coach and develop engineers.
Drive operational rigor proactively.
Act as the default liaison to GTM, FDE, CX and other cross-functional partners.
Pick up technical work alongside your team when it helps, without becoming a blocker.