Senior Engineering Manager

About OPAQUE

OPAQUE is the Confidential AI company. Born from UC Berkeley's RISELab, we solve the core challenge blocking AI adoption at scale: security concerns about data leaks or compliance violations. OPAQUE provides verifiable privacy and governance for AI so organizations can safely run models, agents, and workflows on their most sensitive data. Its Confidential AI platform delivers verifiable runtime governance backed by cryptographic proof that data, models, and agent actions remain private, governed, and compliant with approved policies throughout every AI workflow.

This extends traditional data governance tools with real runtime verification, enabling teams to responsibly deploy AI using their most valuable proprietary data, and move from pilot to production 4-5X faster. Customers and partners include Service Now, Anthropic, Encore Capital, Accenture, and leaders across high tech, financial services, insurance, and healthcare.

We are seeking an exceptionally technical and hands-on Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Growth team, building our agentic studio, SDK, and backend services, driving our product vision towards confidential agentic AI. This role is ideal for a senior engineer who has scaled systems in production, built resilient cloud-based platforms with a developer SDK and studio-based products containing visual workflow engines, and has a proven track record of managing and mentoring engineers, as well as transitioning to a manager role managing small, nimble teams.

You ll lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing software engineering team while remaining deeply involved in architecture, code reviews, and critical technical decisions. You will drive strategy, architecture, and execution for our product, covering our agentic studio frontend, SDK, and backend services, and ensure our systems are reliable, secure, and efficient  role is highly technical and requires hands on experience in Azure, GCP, or AWS, and has fundamental requirements in understanding networking architectures, Kubernetes, Docker, Agile, and RAG workflows.

This role is ideal for a manager who can still code, set a high engineering bar, and communicate clearly across engineering, product, and leadership.

• Lead and mentor a team of software engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, quality, and collaboration.
• Stay hands-on with code (design, reviews, occasional implementation) and guide architectural decisions.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, and foundation/infra teams to plan and deliver high-impact features related to our SDK, confidential computing features
• Translate product and business goals into clear technical plans and execution.
• Hire, onboard, and develop engineers through coaching, feedback, and career growth.
• Drive best practices in software engineering, testing, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly to stakeholders.
• Solid understanding of building systems on GCP, AZURE, or AWS, leveraging native services, and understanding of networking and distributed systems.

• 6-8+ years of experience managing software engineering teams and prior experience as a lead/principal engineer for 5+ years
• Proven experience leading teams of 5–25 engineers in a hands-on role
• Strong software engineering background with the ability to write and review production-quality code (Python, Go, React, Terraform, Postgres, Helm)
• Experience building and scaling modern software systems (cloud, APIs, data-driven or AI-powered products a plus). Prior deep experience in Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, or Azure is a must.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, as you will work across PM, UX, customers, and GTM
• Collaborative leadership style with a strong focus on teamwork, mentorship, and trust
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced, ambiguous startup environments

• Experience at a high-growth AI or developer-focused startup
• Background in distributed systems, ML platforms, security, confidential computing, or data-intensive distributed applications
• Track record of growing teams and mentorship