{"id":86466,"url":"https://alion.io/job/firstprinciples-senior-engineering-manager","title":"Senior Engineering Manager","company":{"id":6477,"name":"FirstPrinciples","domain":"firstprinciples.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/firstprinciples","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US","GB","CA"],"hiring_countries_total":3,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":109000,"max_usd":269000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_seniority_cell","sample_n":2356},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-27T22:57:41Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-27","last_verified_at":"2026-10-27T22:46:33Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":92,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":92},"description":"About FirstPrinciples\nFirstPrinciples is building AI to accelerate scientific discovery. Our core product is the Theo Platform, a research environment built to help researchers iterate faster, validate rigorously, and reach verified results they can trust.\nWe're a fast-growing, remote-first team of builders, researchers, engineers, and thinkers working across Canada, the US, the UK, and expanding globally. What brings us together is a shared curiosity about how the universe works, and a belief that we can build systems that help us explore it more effectively.\nWe spend our time working on questions that don't have clear answers, like how to design AI that can reason through scientific problems, and how the scientific process as a whole might evolve. This is work that sits somewhere between creativity and rigorous thinking, and often requires comfort with ambiguity and iteration. If you're someone who enjoys tackling big, abstract problems and exploring ideas that don't yet have a defined path forward, you'll likely find the work here interesting.\nThe Role:\nWe are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team of four to six engineers building core capabilities for Theo and our scientific research platform.\nYou will develop exceptional engineers, set technical direction, and turn ambitious research ideas into reliable systems. You will operate in a matrixed organization, bringing together specialists from engineering, AI research, physics, simulation, infrastructure, and product into multidisciplinary squads.\nA central part of the role is creating a tight feedback loop between research and engineering. You will help researchers and engineers shape solutions together, evolve promising prototypes collaboratively, and preserve scientific insight as experimental systems become robust, scalable products.\nThis is a hands-on leadership role for someone comfortable moving between people development, architecture, execution, and frontier research.\nWhat You’ll Do\nManage, coach, and develop a team of four to six engineers.\n\nForm and lead multidisciplinary squads around clear scientific and product outcomes.\n\nTranslate open-ended research goals into technical strategies, milestones, and well-designed systems.\n\nPartner closely with researchers and physicists from early exploration through implementation and production.\n\nCreate effective paths for researchers to contribute prototypes, algorithms, evaluations, and domain-specific code alongside engineers.\n\nHelp experimental systems mature without losing the ideas and assumptions that made them scientifically valuable.\n\nGuide architecture, interfaces, technical standards, and major implementation decisions.\n\nEstablish clear ownership and decision-making across teams and reporting lines.\n\nBalance research velocity with reliability, maintainability, reproducibility, security, and cost.\n\nBuild strong practices for testing, evaluation, observability, documentation, deployment, and operational ownership.\n\nStay close enough to the work to review designs, diagnose difficult problems, and contribute directly when it has high leverage.\n\nInfluence engineering strategy, hiring, organizational design, and technical culture beyond your immediate team.\n\nWho You Are:\nSignificant software engineering experience building complex systems.\n\nExperience managing and developing high-performing engineers, with a demonstrated ability to raise the velocity and accountability of engineering teams in a sustainable fashion.\n\nA bias for action and iterative delivery, while maintaining high technical standards.\n\nStrong technical judgement across architecture, implementation, and production operations.\n\nStrong execution judgement of knowing when to explore, when to decide, when to simplify, and when to push a team toward completion.\n\nExperience leading cross-functional or matrixed teams without relying on direct authority.\n\nA record of turning ambiguous ideas or prototypes into dependable capabilities.\n\nThe ability to build trust and shared language across engineering and research disciplines.\n\nScientific curiosity and the technical humility to learn from deep domain experts.\n\nStrong communication, facilitation, and conflict-resolution skills.\n\nA pragmatic, low-ego leadership style grounded in evidence and clear reasoning.\n\nComfort operating where the problem, solution, and path to delivery may all be uncertain.\n\nParticularly Relevant Experience\nAI, machine learning, agentic systems, simulation, scientific computing, or research infrastructure.\n\nModel engineering, applications, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, or developer platforms.\n\nMoving research prototypes into scalable, maintainable products.\n\nDesigning systems where evaluation, provenance, reproducibility, or scientific validity matter.\n\nWorking with physicists, mathematicians, or other research-intensive teams.\n\nLeading remote and globally distributed teams.\n\nWhy FirstPrinciples\nYou will help define how engineers, AI researchers, and physicists work together to build a new kind of scientific instrument-one capable of contributing to humanity’s understanding of the universe.\nPlease submit a resume and cover letter describing your leadership experience, technical background, and interest in our mission. Include “Senior Engineering Manager” in your cover letter.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5334,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"},{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Game Design","AI Research Labs","AI for Science"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-07-27T22:57:41Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":35,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.79,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":91,"expected_fill_days":77,"reasons":["conf:1","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/firstprinciples-senior-engineering-manager","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/firstprinciples-senior-engineering-manager.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-27T23:17:00Z","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":15199,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-28T00:00:00Z"}},"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":6477},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=6477"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Ffirstprinciples-senior-engineering-manager"},{"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%2Ffirstprinciples-senior-engineering-manager"},{"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%2Ffirstprinciples-senior-engineering-manager"},{"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/firstprinciples-senior-engineering-manager\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Ffirstprinciples-senior-engineering-manager"}]}