Senior Engineering Manager, Workload Orchestration

nTop

About The Position

nTop builds parametric design software for the hardest geometry problems in aerospace, defense, and industrial turbo-machinery. Our platform lets engineers define a design as a parametric program — a model that represents not one aircraft or turbine, but every variant of it that a program might need to consider. Customers use nTop to compress the journey from requirements to fielded systems, replacing years of iterative hand-modeling with systematic exploration across design spaces that were previously too large to search. The next step in that journey is scale. The unit of work is no longer an individual engineer at a screen — it's a large-scale distributed computation: thousands of design variants evaluated in parallel, across cloud, HPC, and on-prem infrastructure, with results feeding directly into AI-driven optimization and generative design workflows. We're building the product that makes that possible. We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to build and lead the engineering team responsible for workload orchestration — the infrastructure and product capabilities that let nTop customers define, launch, monitor, and collect results from large-scale distributed computation jobs. This is a new team in a greenfield product area. You will hire, develop, and lead a team of 5–8 engineers while personally contributing to the architecture and early implementation of systems that span containerized headless execution, job scheduling and orchestration, integration with third-party platforms (HEEDS, ModelCenter, PhysicsX Flux), and deployment across customer-managed environments from GPU workstations to cloud-scale Kubernetes clusters. You will partner closely with a Product Manager who owns the product strategy and roadmap for this area. Your job is to own the technical strategy and execution: how the systems are designed, how the team operates, and how the engineering work translates into a product that works reliably in environments with real constraints — IT governance, export control, air-gapped networks, and heterogeneous compute infrastructure. The north-star metric for this team is headless nTop notebook executions: customers exploring more design variations, in less wall-clock time, without a human in the loop for every run.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years managing engineering teams. You've built and shipped distributed systems or infrastructure software, and you've managed the engineers who build them.
Deep technical expertise in distributed computing, containerization, and cloud infrastructure. You have hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and at least one cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure). You understand job scheduling, resource management, and the operational realities of running compute-intensive workloads at scale.
Experience shipping software that runs in customer-managed environments — on-prem, hybrid, or air-gapped — not only in your own cloud. You understand the difference between deploying a SaaS product and deploying software into an enterprise IT environment you don't control.
Proven ability to recruit, develop, and retain strong engineers. You've built teams, not just inherited them. You know how to assess technical talent, set people up for growth, and make hard calls when performance doesn't meet the bar.
Strong product instinct and collaboration skills. You work effectively with product managers, designers, and field engineers. You can reason about customer value, not just technical elegance.

Nice To Haves

Experience with HPC, scientific computing, or engineering simulation workflows. Familiarity with how compute-intensive engineering workloads are structured, scheduled, and executed — whether through HPC job schedulers (Slurm, PBS), MDO tools (HEEDS, ModelCenter, OpenMDAO), or cloud-native batch services.
Background in aerospace, defense, or industrial software. You've built for customers with strict IT governance, security requirements, or export control obligations (ITAR, EAR). You understand that "just spin up a Kubernetes cluster" is not always the answer.
Experience with usage-based or consumption-based pricing models — particularly transitioning a product from per-seat licensing to compute-based commercial models.
Familiarity with C++ codebases and GPU-accelerated computing. nTop's core engine is performance-critical software. You don't need to be a C++ expert, but comfort reading and reasoning about native code is an advantage.

Responsibilities

Build the team.
Recruit, hire, and develop a high-performing team of 5–8 engineers. Set clear expectations, provide direct and constructive feedback, and create an environment where engineers do the best work of their careers. As the founding manager of this team, you will define the team's engineering culture, practices, and norms from the ground up.
Own the technical strategy.
Define the architecture for nTop's headless execution and workload orchestration infrastructure. Make the hard calls on build vs. integrate vs. partner — where nTop owns the stack natively and where it delegates to third-party orchestration platforms or cloud-native services. Ensure the systems you design work across the full range of customer deployment environments: local workstations, on-prem HPC clusters, and cloud.
Write code, especially early on.
This is a player-coach role. In the first year, you'll be hands-on — contributing to design, writing production code, reviewing pull requests, and making architectural decisions in the codebase alongside your team. As the team matures, the balance shifts toward leadership, but you will remain technically credible and engaged throughout.
Ship integrations and infrastructure.
Lead the engineering execution for integrations with orchestration platforms our customers already rely on — HEEDS, ModelCenter, PhysicsX Flux, and cloud-native job services from AWS and GCP. Deliver the first-party headless execution experience: containerized job definition, submission, monitoring, failure handling, and results collection.
Partner with Product.
Work with the Product Manager to translate product strategy into engineering plans. Provide grounded technical input on feasibility, sequencing, and risk. Push back when plans don't account for real constraints; propose alternatives when they don't.
Deliver for customers in hard environments.
Our customers are defense contractors, aerospace OEMs, and industrial manufacturers. Their infrastructure is governed by security policies, export control regulations, and IT organizations that move deliberately. You will engage directly with advanced users and IT stakeholders to understand these constraints and design systems that work within them — not around them.