Engineering Manager

About Replicant

Replicant is building the autonomous contact center: AI that answers every call, decides whether a specific AI or a person is best suited to resolve it, and manages the conversation end to end, getting better with every one. We start with voice, the channel people reach for first and the hardest to automate well, and we have run these agents in production for enterprises since 2020.

The bots we deliver are the product, so engineering here sits unusually close to customer outcomes.

Customer service is a nearly trillion-dollar problem that is barely one percent automated and moving fast: the category of the decade, and the question is who leads it. Winning means executing a company’s procedures with near-perfect reliability while knowing exactly when to flex, which is why determinism and testability are how we earn trust in production, not relics. Meeting that bar on a complex, AI-heavy platform takes a team that can move quickly without losing rigor.

We are lean by design. A small, senior team does the work of a group several times its size, and every engineer owns multiple initiatives. The engineering organization is about 50 people today and growing, and we hold a high bar as we scale.

We are hiring an Engineering Manager to lead one of our Product Engineering squads: a team of roughly 8 to 15 engineers that takes on a range of projects and products across our platform. You will report directly to the SVP of Engineering, and you will hold full budget and headcount-planning responsibility for your team.

Your priorities, in order: your people, their growth, the process and norms your team works by, and the delivery that follows from all three. This is a servant‑leadership role, not a boss‑first one. You are not here to own a team; you are here to unlock one. Replicant has invested in every engineer you will lead, and your job is to help each of them do the best work of their career while making that investment pay off, for them and for the company.

We expect our managers to be outstanding people managers first. You will carry enough technical competency to establish credibility with your engineers and to reason well about tradeoffs, priorities, and risk, while trusting your senior ICs to own the code. Shape a great process, fit the right people to it, then get out of the way so your team can move.

This is the part we care about most, and the thing that makes the role different from most EM jobs. We are not hiring someone to run their own silo. We are hiring a peer for a tight engineering‑management team that makes the decisions for the whole engineering department together.

Concretely, that looks like:

• first-team principle
  : your first team is the other engineering managers, not only your squad. We solve the department's challenges together, and we back each other's teams, covering rituals, 1:1s, and on‑call through transitions and leave.

• We meet several times a week in short, high‑intensity working sessions. Cameras on, fully engaged; this is explicitly not a status meeting or a manager vanity meeting. We bias hard toward decisions and action, and we keep a decision journal so calls stick.

• We disagree and commit
  . High trust, high candor, direct feedback given early rather than left to fester. Once a decision is made, we all carry it.

As a group we own the things that make engineering work here: the hiring bar and interview process; the career ladder, leveling, and competency framework; how the roadmap originates and gets prioritized; quarterly OKRs; testing and validation standards; platform and agent quality; the bot‑building and delivery process; developer experience and AI enablement; org design, on‑call, and incident culture; and…