Engineering Manager - Core Infra

Cinder•New York, NY

2d•$190,000 - $250,000•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.

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 lead architecture and trade-off discussions, review work credibly, and jump into the code when it helps.
Experience setting roadmaps and priorities in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment, and the judgment to decide what to deprioritize.
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.
You give direct, constructive feedback as a matter of course, and you deliver it in a way people can act on.
Clear written communication in PRs, Slack, planning docs, and cross-functional updates.

Nice To Haves

Experience in Trust & Safety or abuse prevention.
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, bringing business context and translating it into focused execution.
Raise the bar on team-level execution quality, ensuring fewer regressions, clear ownership, and no last-minute surprises.
Build a team that self-organizes by triaging and sharing work across itself and with other teams.
Coach and develop engineers by setting clear expectations and providing direct, constructive feedback.
Drive operational rigor proactively by defining SLIs/SLOs and addressing reliability and tech-debt problems.
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.