{"id":463171,"url":"https://alion.io/job/apollo-research-engineering-manager-product","title":"Engineering Manager (Product)","company":{"id":178413,"name":"Apollo Research","domain":"apolloresearch.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/apollo-research","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":null},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":283000,"max":396000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":396000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":4,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI Codex","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Scrum","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-28T08:50:09Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-28","last_verified_at":"2026-10-31T16:05:22Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":64,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":64},"description":"THE OPPORTUNITY\nWe are building Watcher, a coding agent security product. Watcher is deployed in production and monitors billions of agent tokens per month across engineering teams at agent-building scale-ups and multinational enterprises. We are now hiring our first dedicated Engineering Manager to lead the product engineering team.\nWe are looking for a strong hand-on engineer who still ships code, and can own both the people management and the execution of the product engineering team. This is a player-coach role. Today, you will spend most of your time managing and coordinating, but still ship code. As the team grows, you’ll transition towards 100% leadership and management.\nThe team is small today and is growing fast, so you will have significant say in shaping the team, the process, and the product, and your scope will grow with the team. You will report directly to Marius (CEO), who will own Watcher’s product direction and roadmap.\nKEY RESPONSIBILITIES\nExecution and delivery management (~40%)\nOwn the team's planning and tracking. Turn goals and customer commitments into concrete, well-scoped tickets with clear owners. Everyone on the team should always know what they're supposed to be doing and whether we're on track.\n\nRun the operating rhythm (planning, standups or async equivalents, retros).\n\nTrack dependencies between product engineering, monitoring research, and infrastructure/security work, and proactively resolve conflicts.\n\nTranslate between researchers and product engineers. Turn research outputs (new monitors, backtesting results) into scoped, prioritized engineering work.\n\nTrack customer commitments (integration timelines, requested features, incident follow-ups) and coordinate releases, testing, documentation, and customer communication.\n\nSurface risks and slippage early, and proactively give Marius (CEO) an accurate, always-current picture of status.\n\nPeople management (~30%)\nDirectly manage the product engineers. Run regular 1on1s, give direct and actionable feedback, and own their growth, performance, and wellbeing.\n\nOwn performance management end to end. Set clear expectations, recognize strong work, and address underperformance early and honestly.\n\nDrive hiring for the team. Own the pipeline together with ops, run interview loops, close candidates, and onboard new engineers so they ship in their first weeks.\n\nProtect the team's focus. Shield engineers from thrash, keep meetings minimal, and make sure priorities are stable enough to execute against.\n\nHands-on engineering (~30%)\nShip code yourself. Features, bug fixes, internal tooling, and prototypes, primarily in Python and TypeScript. Staying hands-on keeps your technical judgment current and your tickets realistic.\n\nSet the technical bar, make architecture decisions, review code and establish norms, and release and incident processes.\n\nBuild tooling that makes the team faster, including AI-assisted tooling for your own job (status reporting, ticket triage, ramp-up docs). We expect you to leverage AI heavily when reasonable across both management and engineering work.\n\nREPRESENTATIVE PROJECTS\nLead the team within 90 days. For the first few weeks, you will work closely with all engineers to understand their priorities, all of our ways of working, and procedures. Then, we ramp up responsibilities and you start to scope out proposals and get rapid and detailed feedback. Once you have onboarded properly, you will start running the meetings, etc.\n\nDeliver a major customer integration. Scope a large enterprise deployment with the team, turn it into tickets, sequence it against other priorities, track progress against the customer's timeline, and ship code on the critical path yourself where needed.\n\nScale the team. Scope the hiring needs for the next 2-3 product engineers, drive the process end to end, while keeping the existing team shipping. Ensure hiring is done to a high standard and is fast.\n\nBridge a research handoff. Take a new monitoring capability from the research team, work with researchers and engineers to turn it into a scoped production plan, and manage its delivery into Watcher including rollout, documentation, and customer-facing changes\n\nJOB REQUIREMENTS\nMust-haves\nStrong engineering background. You worked as a software engineer for at least 4 years before managing. You still ship production code today. You will be judged partly on code you write in this role, primarily in Python and/or TypeScript.\n\nPeople management experience. You have hired, onboarded and managed small teams of engineers directly (1on1s, feedback, performance,), or you have been a tech lead who de facto did this for at least 2 years. You can point to engineers who grew or shipped better because of you.\n\nExecution ownership. You have run delivery for a multi-person engineering effort, turning goals into tickets, tracking them to completion, and being accountable for the outcome.\n\nHigh agency. You see what the team needs and do it without being asked, whether that's fixing a process, having a hard conversation, or shipping the fix yourself.\n\nDirect communication. You give and take blunt feedback, address problems with people early and kindly, and say clearly when something is off track, including to the CEO.\n\nStartup pace. You are excited about a fast-moving environment, comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities, and willing to grind when it matters.\n\nComfortable leveraging AI heavily for management, coordination, and coding work, while holding the output to a high standard. You have used Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar tools heavily.\n\nStrong nice-to-haves\nExperience coordinating between research and engineering, or shipping products with an ML/research component.\n\nCustomer-facing delivery experience, e.g. enterprise integrations, deployment projects, or technical account work.\n\nExplicitly not required\nFormal AI safety background. We need excellent engineering leaders who can learn the AI safety context.\n\nLarge-team management experience. This is a small, senior team. Managing 30 people at a big company is neither necessary nor necessarily good preparation.\n\nCertifications (PMP, scrum, etc.). We care about demonstrated ability, not credentials. If your instinct is the heavyweight process, this is the wrong team.\n\nBENEFITS\nThis role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.\n\nSalary: San Francisco: $283,000 - $396,000; London: £190,000 - £266,000. We will be looking to meaningfully raise salaries soon.\n\nOur engineers effectively have an unlimited token budget. If a better result costs more compute, use it.\n\nFlexible work hours and schedule\n\nUnlimited vacation\n\nUnlimited sick leave\n\nUp to 6 months of paid parental leave\n\nComprehensive health, dental and vision insurance\n\nRetirement savings with competitive employer matching (e.g. 401(k) for US employees)\n\nLunch, dinner, and snacks are provided for all employees on workdays\n\nPaid work trips, including staff retreats, business trips, and relevant conferences\n\nA yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget\n\nRelocation support and visa fees (if applicable)\n\nLOGISTICS\nTime Allocation: Full-time\n\nLocation: This is an in-person role working out of our London or San Francisco office. We offer flexible working hours and some wfh arrangements.\n\nVisa sponsorship: We sponsor visas in both the UK and US. Sponsorship isn't guaranteed for every role or candidate, but if we make you an offer, we'll work with you to find the right visa route.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7514,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":4,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":30,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Flexible schedule","Parental leave","Professional development","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["AI Safety & Alignment"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-06T11:37:30Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"GB","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"Licensed UK visa sponsor (Skilled Worker, Senior or Specialist Worker)","filings_12m":null,"filings_prev_12m":null,"green_card_filings_12m":null,"median_offered_wage_usd":null,"route":"Skilled Worker; Global Business Mobility: Senior or Specialist Worker","cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-31T06:23:40+00:00","sources":["UK Home Office: register of licensed sponsors (workers)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":58,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.803,"p_room":0.72,"age_days":63,"expected_fill_days":101,"reasons":["conf:0","win:mid","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-31T05:58:55Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":396000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/apollo-research-engineering-manager-product","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/apollo-research-engineering-manager-product.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-31T16:56:14Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":26462,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-01T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":178413},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=178413"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fapollo-research-engineering-manager-product"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fapollo-research-engineering-manager-product"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fapollo-research-engineering-manager-product"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/apollo-research-engineering-manager-product\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fapollo-research-engineering-manager-product"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":463171}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"apolloresearch.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":463171},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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