Senior Engineering Manager, Engineering Practice

Engineering
11 is building a new way for software teams to build and operate software at AI speed and volume. Our products — Full Stack Foundation, Foundry, and Alloy — combine a production-ready software foundation, AI agents and workflows, and a continuously maintained engineering knowledge corpus. We use these products ourselves to build custom software for customers, while also making them available to other engineering teams.

We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager, Engineering Practice to help us scale how engineering works across the company.

This is not a traditional engineering manager role built around managing one team of eight or nine engineers. You will operate across our customer software and product engineering organizations, with your primary day-to-day focus on Custom Software Development. You will directly manage engineers working in customer and product pods, including engineers from our offshore development partner, other contractors, and future Engineering
11 hires.

You will own much of the operating system behind our engineering organization: how pods are staffed, how engineering capacity is allocated, how commitments are understood, how engineers are developed and evaluated, and how our external engineering partners operate as an extension of Engineering
11.

You will work closely with our Principal Engineers, product leadership, delivery leadership, UX, Quality Engineering, and Platform Ops. Our Principals own technical direction in their areas; this role owns the engineering practice and helps make sure the people, pods, capacity, and management systems around that work are strong.

You will also play a key role in defining Engineering
11's AI Development Life Cycle (AIDLC) — how AI changes the traditional software development life cycle from planning and architecture through implementation, testing, review, deployment, and ongoing maintenance. This role will help turn emerging AI-enabled engineering practices into a repeatable operating model for our teams.

Engineering
11 is also customer zero for its own products. This role will make sure our engineers use our products on every release, build real expertise with them, and feed what they learn back into the products.

This is a highly visible role with an opportunity to help shape how a modern engineering organization operates as AI fundamentally changes software development.

• Significant software engineering experience, including a strong technical foundation before moving into engineering management.
• Several years of engineering leadership experience with direct responsibility for software engineers.
• Experience managing multiple teams, pods, or concurrent engineering work streams.
• Experience managing distributed, offshore, nearshore, contractor, or external development teams.
• Strong understanding of engineering capacity planning, staffing, commitments, and workload management.
• Demonstrated ability to evaluate engineer performance, provide direct feedback, coach engineers, and address performance issues.
• Experience hiring, onboarding, developing, and retaining software engineers.
• Strong enough technically to understand the work, participate credibly in engineering discussions, and recognize technical or organizational problems without needing to be the architect for every solution.
• Ability to operate effectively in a small, fast-moving organization where leaders are expected to be hands‑on and own problems end to end.
• Strong communication, organization, judgment, and follow‑through.

Especially valuable experience:

• Experience spanning both product engineering and customer-facing or custom software development.
• Experience building or improving an engineering management practice rather than simply inheriting an…