Senior Engineering Manager

About the role

This role owns the core engineering team responsible for ingesting massive volumes of social data and transforming it into actionable insights. You will architect and deliver AI-native products that power real-time agent workflows for brand and community teams. The position requires deep product instincts to define what gets built while mentoring senior technical contributors on your squad. You will act as a trusted peer to Product and Design, challenging assumptions and shaping long-term product strategy from the ground up. This is a leadership position where your technical judgment directly influences system design and execution quality. You will drive operational excellence across your team, including on-call rotations, incident response, and scalable engineering processes. You will also play a key role in hiring and developing top-tier engineers as we scale the organization.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Lead and mentor a team of software engineers, guiding mid-level to staff-level contributors through coaching, feedback, and career development.
• Partner with Product and Design as a peer to define team roadmaps, set priorities, and make strategic tradeoffs based on user problems and business impact.
• Maintain regular customer interactions by sitting in on customer calls to build empathy for how social and brand teams operate.
• Own end-to-end delivery for your product domain, balancing execution speed, system scalability, and measurable business outcomes.
• Stay hands-on technically by reviewing designs, diving into code during critical production issues, and building internal tools that improve engineering velocity.
• Establish and refine engineering processes such as sprint planning, system design reviews, on-call rotations, incident response, and post-mortems.
• Drive technical quality and culture by mentoring senior engineers, promoting best practices, and removing impediments that slow down the team.
• Recruit, interview, and hire top-tier engineering talent to support the rapid growth of the engineering organization.
• Contribute to shaping the broader engineering culture as the organization scales from approximately 50 people into the next phase of growth.
• Maintain strong curiosity and AI literacy, exploring how artificial intelligence transforms both product capabilities and engineering workflows.

Requirements

• Bring 8+ years of total experience in software engineering, with at least 2 years in a direct engineering management role leading high-performing software teams.
• Demonstrate strong product instincts, including forming independent opinions on product direction and measuring success through customer outcomes rather than output metrics.
• Retain the technical depth to read unfamiliar code and reason through system details without relying solely on delegation.
• Show a history of collaborating as a peer with Product Managers and Product Designers, especially in fast-paced, ambiguous startup settings.
• Exhibit a bias toward action and comfort operating within high-growth environments where priorities change frequently.
• Communicate clearly and directly in both written and verbal formats, building trust across cross-functional partners.
• Maintain an active interest and experience in how AI is reshaping product capabilities and modern software engineering practices.
• Commit to upholding the high standards required for building scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems that serve both internal and external customers.

Nice to have

• Accumulate 5+ years of domain expertise in B2B SaaS, social data platforms, commerce, or marketing technology.
• Demonstrate prior experience in product engineering within environments that integrate AI capabilities into core products.
• Show a track record of influencing product strategy through data-driven insights and experimentation.
• Possess familiarity with modern AI tooling and workflows used in software engineering and product development.
• Highlight experience scaling engineering organizations and mentoring senior-level engineers through career growth.

Practical notes

This role is based in Palo Alto, California, and requires in-person presence. The position is full-time and eligible for standard employment benefits as applicable to local regulations. No visa sponsorship is indicated at this time. Travel is not expected as part of this role.