Founding Engineering Manager

People Culture Talent•San Francisco, CA

16d

About The Position

We are looking for a Founding Engineering Manager to join a Series A AI infrastructure company at a pivotal moment. You'll work directly with the founders and a founding engineering team that came up through Google, Meta, Cruise, and AWS. This team writes their own feature docs, owns customer support rotations, and holds craft as a non-negotiable value. The people here haven't left. There is high retention, high trust, and this person's job will be to protect that culture while scaling it. This is a hands-on role. You'll be close to the technical work, close to the people doing it, and close to the decisions that shape how the team grows. This venture backed AI infrastructure company is developing the connectivity layer that enables AI platforms and B2B software to take meaningful action within the systems businesses rely on. The founding team brings experience from Google, Meta, and AWS. The team is small, retention rates are exceptional, and the technical standards are high. This is an excellent opportunity for professionals who are excited about meaningful ownership and the chance to help shape the future of collaboration between businesses and AI.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI-native products, developer tools, developer tools, APIs, or cloud infrastructure
Experience in customer-facing engineering organizations
Early engineering leadership at a startup (first or second management hire)

Responsibilities

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.