Manager, Engineering

Kodex • San Francisco, CA

37d • Remote

About The Position

We are hiring an Engineering Manager to lead our Core Portal and Verifications teams, the central surface through which customers interact with Kodex. This work sits at the heart of our product: everything our customers do flows through the Core Portal; and the Verifications Team provides the internal tooling necessary to ensure all activity on the Portal is performed by verified law enforcement agents via strict initial onboarding and continuous suspicious activity monitoring. Verifications lives within Core Portal today, with the potential to grow into its own team over time.
You will manage and grow a team of experienced engineers, partner closely with Product, and help define what the EM role looks like as Kodex scales. You will be highly technical, but your primary mission is people: ensuring that the engineers on your team are happy, growing, and working on the highest impact problems.
You will also help drive AI proficiency across the team. We want our engineers to treat AI tools as real partners in how we design and build software. Experience with tools like Claude Code is a huge plus, and developing strong AI fluency in this role will be expected.
This is an ideal role for a deeply technical, people-first leader who enjoys building structure in a startup environment, cares about career development, and wants to help shape how Kodex engineering operates.

Requirements

• Have ~3–7+ years as an Engineering Manager or equivalent people leader, and previously worked as a hands-on engineer.
• Have enough technical depth to engage confidently with senior engineers on architecture and complex systems.
• Lead with empathy, care about people’s careers, and are comfortable being human and honest with your team.
• Have run performance reviews, navigated hard feedback, and coached engineers through real growth.
• Are used to partnering with PMs from idea → requirements → shipped work, and bring user and business context into technical decisions.
• Have taken a team from conflicting inputs and ad-hoc work to a clear backlog and simple, effective rituals.
• Enjoy improving process just enough to help people move faster, not to add bureaucracy.
• Are excited about leveraging AI in engineering workflows, and either have experience with tools like Claude Code or are eager to become highly proficient with them.
• Prefer rolling up your sleeves and fixing problems directly rather than waiting for someone else to own them.
• Thrive in remote, startup environments.

Nice To Haves

• have experience in security, encryption, or data-protection–heavy systems.

Responsibilities

• Manage, mentor, and coach engineers, building a healthy, inclusive team where people enjoy the work and feel they’re growing.
• Consolidate inputs from engineers, three PMs, and leadership into a single, prioritized backlog for the Core Portal team.
• Run simple, effective planning and prioritization so everyone understands what we’re doing and why.
• Improve remote communication habits so people ask questions, share context, and avoid working in isolation.
• Partner closely with PMs to define roadmaps, shape requirements, and balance product priorities with technical debt and reliability.
• Engage in deep technical discussions with senior engineers on architecture, tradeoffs, and systems design.
• Encourage and model effective use of AI tools in day-to-day engineering work, helping the team adopt and continually improve how they use tools like Claude Code.
• Ensure the team’s systems are reliable, maintainable, and aligned with our long-term technical direction.
• Define and track team goals, communicate progress and risks to leadership, and make Core Portal a model team within engineering.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed