Tech Lead Manager (Platform)

Distributed Spectrum•New York, NY

9d•Onsite

About The Position

DS creates systems that power the next generation of radio spectrum intelligence. We collect radio data from all over the world, train neural networks to decipher it, and run them on the smallest chips we can. We’re solving a new, technically hard problem where nothing from other fields works out of the box, and along the way, we’ve built our own stack from scratch, including entirely new embedding model architectures, custom GPU kernels, and much more. This year we’ve done 8-figure revenue, tripled our headcount, and raised a $25M Series A led by Sarah Guo (Conviction), Akhil Iyer (Shield Capital), and Nat Friedman (NFDG). We’re using it to invest in new research and to grow our small, New York-based team across engineering, research, and product. Joining DS means owning major parts of a fast-growing AI research organization, joining a collaborative, talent-dense team with decades of experience in probabilistic ML, accelerated computing, embedded systems, and signal theory, and growing your career in the areas that interest you. You’ll fit in if you want to come to work for the problem itself and don’t want to choose between technical rigor, business value, and real-world impact. We work with high ownership and trust, and we do it together in the office 5 days/week. The Role We are hiring a Tech Lead Manager (Platform) to lead our platform engineering function that builds shared services, tooling, and foundations that directly shape customer experience. This is a staff-level role that blends deep systems expertise with hands-on technical leadership and people management. Our product operates where embedded systems, machine learning, and hardware meet the real world. In this environment, decisions about memory usage, networking, system behavior, and offline operation surface directly in the user experience. There is no clean separation between “platform” and “product”; the foundations and services we build directly shape the product experience. That reality shapes how we think about leadership. We believe the best user experiences are built by leaders who deeply understand the systems behind them. In this role, you will be a systems-oriented engineer who chooses to lead. You will own the systems, services, and tooling that enable everything downstream of sensor processing while guiding the team responsible for the full-stack experiences our customers interact with across web and Android.

Requirements

Thinks in systems, not just frameworks
Understands how operating systems, memory, and networks affect real software behavior
Believes great user experiences start with strong technical foundations
Is comfortable leading through technical and typical start up ambiguity
Wants to stay hands-on while growing engineers and influencing the broader org
C++ (or similar systems languages such as Rust)
Python
React (exposure helpful, but not required)
Linux-based systems
Networking fundamentals (DNS, DHCP, interfaces, data flow, queues)
Build systems, packaging, deployment, and CI/CD practices
User interface systems that live on top of systems software (frontend architectures, design systems, cloud microservices, etc.)
How systems fail under memory or networking pressure
How to design software that cannot assume constant connectivity

Responsibilities

The architecture and evolution of our platform in constrained, real-world environments
Systems design that performs reliably without cloud or internet dependencies
The technical foundations that power customer-facing experiences across web and Android
Large, ambiguous initiatives tied to annual company goals and outcomes
Engineering practices that raise the bar for quality, reliability, and execution