Engineering Manager

About the role

You will own the full lifecycle of engineering delivery for your team, setting technical direction and ensuring that ambitious product goals are met without compromising on reliability. You will be deeply involved in hands-on technical work, writing and reviewing code while also making key architectural decisions that shape the long-term health of the system. You will partner with cross-functional stakeholders to translate high-level product goals into clear engineering requirements and execution plans. You will mentor engineers at all levels, helping them grow their technical skills and advance their careers through coaching and practical feedback. You will drive execution on complex, high-stakes projects, balancing speed with the need for correctness and stability. You will champion rigorous engineering practices, enforcing standards around quality, testing, and correctness across the team. You will ensure that every issue, especially those uncovered in simulation, leads to fast and complete resolutions. If you want to lead from the front and work on the hardest problems in software reliability, this is your role.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of engineers who genuinely care about what they build and how they build it.
• Drive execution on complex, high-priority projects - keeping things moving without cutting corners that matter.
• Get your hands dirty - write and review code, weigh in on architecture, debug the hard stuff.
• Partner with technical leaders across the company to align your team's direction with broader product and engineering goals.
• Raise the bar on engineering practices: quality, reliability, and correctness.
• Build a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Own the technical roadmap for your team, balancing long-term platform investments with immediate product needs.
• Coordinate closely with product and design to turn ambiguous problems into well-defined engineering tasks.
• Ensure that testing and verification practices keep pace with the complexity of distributed systems and simulation.
• Track and improve team health, removing blockers and fostering an environment where engineers can do their best work.
• Collaborate with platform teams to manage dependencies, infrastructure, and internal tools like Pangolin.
• Contribute to hiring decisions, conducting interviews and helping evaluate candidates for engineering roles.
• Maintain deep familiarity with the tech stack, including C++, Rust, TypeScript, React, Nix, and related tools.
• Represent the team in cross-company discussions on standards, reliability, and long-term technical strategy.

Requirements

• Strong engineering chops - comfortable in C++, Python, Java, Go, or similar. You don't need to know every language we use, but you do need to be genuinely good at programming.
• Experience with test infrastructure, or developer tooling is a major plus.
• Deep experience with distributed systems, databases, and large-scale architectures - ideally with some scars to prove it.
• Proven track record of leading engineering teams - recruiting, mentoring, and growing talent, ideally in a startup or high-growth environment.
• Strong technical judgment. You can make the right call on hard architectural questions and explain why clearly.
• Excellent communicator. You can align engineers, PMs, and executives around a shared direction without losing anyone along the way.
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity. We're early. Things change. You adapt.
• Must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship, as we are unable to sponsor visas for this role.
• Must be located in the Vienna, VA, USA area, as this is an in-person role requiring daily collaboration.
• Must commit to a 5-day work week in the office to maintain team cohesion and effective collaboration.
• Must be comfortable working on systems where correctness is measured through simulation and exhaustive verification.

Nice to have

• Experience with deterministic testing, fuzzing, or formal verification in complex distributed systems.
• Background in developer platforms, internal tooling, or infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Experience building and operating SaaS products with direct customer interaction.
• Familiarity with Rust or C++ in performance-critical or safety-critical systems.

Practical notes

This role requires 5 days a week in the office in Northern Virginia to enable close collaboration, trust-building, and effective problem-solving. The position is full-time and based in the United States, and candidates must be eligible to work without sponsorship. The role involves significant hands-on technical contribution and first-line management responsibilities.