Engineering Manager

You will lead the engineering team. To start, that is a small group of senior ICs working on the Wren runtime, the compliance system, and the per-building record. Your job is to make that team better at its work, to protect it from the kind of pressure that turns careful engineering into shipped-and-forgotten product, and to keep the team honest about what the system does and does not do.

This is a hands-on manager role at a small company. You will write design documents. You will review code when it helps. You will interview candidates carefully and say no to people other companies would hire. You will also be the person who absorbs the cost of saying no, and who defends a slower schedule when the alternative is shipping something an architect would not sign.

We are not a growth-at-all-costs shop, and the management craft here does not look like the management craft at a typical Series B startup. If you are evaluated by the number of people under you, this will not be the right fit.

You will work directly with the founder, the research lead, and the founding designer. You will be the primary interface between engineering and the licensed reviewers who use the product, and you will make sure their feedback reaches the people who can act on it.

In your first year you will hire two or three engineers carefully, set the review standard for the codebase, and establish the writing-before-building norm that keeps the team honest. You will own the way the engineering team coordinates with research and with our licensed reviewers, which is where most of the value of this company is actually produced. You will run one-on-ones that feel like real conversations rather than status updates.

You will also own the boring-but-critical work of making sure the team does not drift. That means saying out loud when a project has lost its purpose, killing work that should be killed, and making sure that what we ship matches what we said we were going to ship. The team should feel, year over year, that it is getting sharper rather than larger.

Eight or more years in engineering, with at least three years managing senior ICs on work that had to be correct. You have been the engineering manager on a system whose failures were consequential. You have hired carefully and declined to hire. You write well, which is non-negotiable in this role.

In character, we are looking for someone who takes the craft of management seriously and who believes that a small team of serious people is more valuable than a large team of fast people. You should be comfortable defending a long timeline to a founder who agrees with you, and you should be uncomfortable taking credit for work the team did.

Prior management experience at a small company where engineering sat inside a regulated or safety-critical domain. Experience mentoring research-minded engineers.

Senior engineering-manager compensation, early-stage equity on a standard four-year schedule, full health and dental, 401(k) with match, five weeks of paid time off, and an office in lower Manhattan. Hybrid by default.