Senior Engineering Manager

HumanSignal

12d

About The Position

HumanSignal is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead and develop their engineering team. This role involves managing engineers directly, including 1:1s, feedback, performance, and promotions. The manager will own delivery, ensuring that planned features are shipped predictably and that engineers gain more ownership. A key aspect of the role is helping engineers grow professionally in areas like scoping, estimating, decision-making, and owning outcomes. The manager is also expected to remain hands-on by writing and shipping code to inform technical decisions and problem-solving, without becoming the team's bottleneck. The role involves working with coding agents, challenging architectural decisions, and balancing long-term product development with customer deadlines. The manager will own planning, scoping, and shipping quality software, defining how the team works, hiring, providing feedback, and making technical judgments. They will also manage the engineering response to escalations, ensuring accountability for the response rather than personally fixing every issue. The team is building a ground-up rebuild of the annotation editor using coding agents, native evaluation of agent trajectories, continuous calibration, a workforce platform, and quality analytics. The stack includes Python/Django, TypeScript/React, Postgres, and Kubernetes, with coding agents used daily. Success is defined by engineers taking greater ownership, early surfacing of risks, reconciliation of commitments and priorities, and reliable shipping without the manager needing to rescue releases.

Requirements

Managed engineers for at least a couple of years.
Hired and developed people, addressed underperformance directly, and made difficult people decisions when necessary.
Was a strong engineer for long enough to develop sound technical judgment.
Can reason about architecture and tradeoffs beyond your own code.
Still build software and enjoy it.
Use coding agents seriously and can explain, with examples, what effective use looks like.
Shipped at a startup and know how to make decisions with incomplete information.
Say what you think early, give specific feedback, and don’t manage by avoidance.
Can balance long-term product work with customer deadlines, negotiate realistic commitments, and recognize when a services request should become a product capability, and when it shouldn’t.

Nice To Haves

Experience with ML tooling, data platforms, or evaluation systems.
Experience managing a distributed team.
Frontend architecture depth.

Responsibilities

Manage engineers directly: 1:1s, feedback, performance, promotions, and difficult conversations.
Own delivery: ensure what is decided to be built turns into shipped software on a predictable rhythm.
Help engineers become better professionals: better at scoping, estimating, making decisions, and owning outcomes rather than tasks.
Remain hands-on by writing and shipping code to make better technical decisions, work through difficult problems, and improve how the team builds.
Use coding agents in real work and understand where they help, where they fail, and how to verify their output.
Challenge architectural decisions, explain tradeoffs, and help the team choose an approach it can ship and maintain.
Plan, scope, and ship quality software against a roadmap.
Make tradeoffs explicit and push back when the team is asked to do more than it can do well.
Establish enough structure for predictable delivery without slowing down a small team.
Remove friction, address recurring blockers, and improve how AI tooling is used.
Handle hiring, setting clear expectations, providing regular feedback, managing growth, promotions, and exits.
Stay close enough to the code and architecture to challenge decisions and support engineers without becoming the approval gate for everything.
Manage the engineering response to escalations: get the right people involved, make priority calls, and address recurring causes across customer, services-team, and open-source issues.
Turn the experience of using the platform into better products, not just a growing list of one-off customer fixes.