Founding Engineering Manager

An ambitious AI startup is hiring a hands-on Founding Engineering Manager to develop its engineering team, shape product direction and ship alongside the people you lead.

Working directly with the founders, you’ll own engineering standards, hiring and delivery, with real influence over the roadmap and how the team grows.

What you’ll do

• Coach engineers, lead hiring and performance management, and build a culture of ownership.
• Set technical standards, guide architecture decisions and improve delivery.
• Partner with the founders on product priorities, using customer conversations and real usage to guide decisions.
• Run small, measurable experiments: test ideas, learn quickly and decide what to build, change or stop.
• Ship production code and represent engineering in conversations with customer CTOs and CISOs.

What you’ll bring

• Proven technical leadership, with clear examples of engineers who improved under your management.
• Strong product judgement and evidence of turning customer feedback into measurable outcomes.
• Current hands-on coding ability and broad expertise across backend, infrastructure, DevOps and AI.
• Early-stage engineering leadership or founder experience.
• High proficiency with AI coding tools and a practical approach to continuous improvement.

Experience shipping AI/agent products or growing engineering from one team to several is a bonus.

You’ll need to be exceptional in technical leadership or product thinking—and strong in the other.

Join at a stage where you can shape the team, influence the product and share in its success through equity.