Engineering Manager

Role : Engineering Manager - Senior Leadership

Who We Are :

The infrastructure layer that sits between every code change and every confident release. We're at an inflection point - the product is proven, the market is real, and now we're scaling the team and the platform that will define this category.

We move fast. We hold a high bar. We don't separate "building" from "owning." Every person on this team - engineering, product, GTM - is accountable for outcomes, not activities.

This Engineering Manager role is one of the most consequential hires we'll make this year. You'll lead the team building the most technically complex parts of our platform, work directly with the founding team, and be the connective tissue between engineering, product, and the customers who depend on what we ship.

What This Role Is :

You lead the engineering team responsible for knowledge graph infrastructure, and core product experience. Your team includes AI architects, AI/agent systems engineers, backend platform engineers, and frontend engineers. You are not a coordinator. You are a technical leader who manages, and a manager who stays close enough to the technology to make good decisions about it.

You own two things above everything else : quality of what ships and when it ships. Not as competing priorities - as a single standard. High quality delivered late is a missed commitment. Fast delivery of something unstable is a customer problem. You hold both simultaneously and you build a team that does the same.

Beyond engineering, this role has direct involvement with GTM - customer escalations, pre-sales technical discussions, onboarding reliability, and the feedback loops between what customers experience and what engineering prioritizes. You are not insulated from customers. You are accountable to them.

What You'll Own :

1. Engineering Execution and Delivery :

You own the team's delivery commitments. Roadmap items have dates, and those dates mean something. You work with the GPM team to scope accurately, surface risks early, and protect the team from scope creep without losing customer responsiveness. When timelines slip, you're the first to know and the first to act - not the last to report.

You run a tight engineering cadence. Sprints have clear goals. Retros produce actual changes. Standups surface blockers, not just status. You know the difference between a team that's busy and a team that's making progress.

2. Product Quality :

You are accountable for the quality of everything that ships under your team's ownership. This means :

- 1. You define and enforce engineering quality standards - code review practices, test coverage expectations, definition of done

- 2. You own the bug triage process and you personally track the health of the backlog

- 3. You hold the bar on what "ready to ship" means - and you push back when it isn't

- 4. You treat production incidents as architectural signals, not operational noise

Quality is not QA's job. It's yours.

3. Platform Stability and Reliability :

Testsigma is infrastructure that customers depend on. When the platform is unstable, customer test runs fail, release pipelines stall, and trust erodes. You own the reliability posture of the platform - uptime, latency, error rates, incident response, and the engineering practices that prevent incidents from recurring.

You define SLOs. You review them monthly. You make engineering prioritization decisions that protect them. When something goes wrong in production, you lead the response - not from the sidelines, but in the room.

4. Team Leadership and Growth :

You build the team - hiring, onboarding, mentoring, performance management. You have a high bar for who joins and you hold it even when there's hiring pressure. You develop the engineers on your team - not just as engineers, but as owners.

You lead a team with significant range : AI architects who think in system design, AI engineers who build production agent systems, backend engineers who build the data and integration layer, and frontend engineers who build the interface customers interact with daily. You don't need to be the deepest expert in each - but you need to be credible enough to evaluate work, give useful feedback, and make good decisions about technical trade-offs.

You protect the team from organizational noise and clear their path. And you hold them accountable when they need to be held.

5. PM Partnership :

You work closely with the Product Managers on roadmap prioritization, sprint planning, and quarterly goal-setting. This partnership is direct and honest - you push back on scope that isn't achievable, you surface engineering dependencies that affect product decisions, and you jointly own the outcome, not just your half of it.

You translate product intent into engineering clarity. When a requirement is ambiguous, you close the gap - you don't let it become a delivery risk.

6. GTM and Customer Involvement :

This is not a back-office engineering role. You work directly with the GTM team - sales, customer success, solutions engineering - and with customers themselves. Specifically :

- 1. You join strategic customer conversations where platform architecture or reliability is on the table

- 2. You lead the response to critical customer escalations - you understand the problem technically, you communicate clearly, and you follow through on commitments

- 3. You review customer feedback loops and ensure what customers are experiencing directly influences what engineering prioritizes

- 4. You participate in pre-sales discussions where technical depth matters - customers evaluating Testsigma at the enterprise level want to talk to an engineering leader, not just a salesperson

- 5. You own the reliability commitments that go into customer contracts and you build the engineering practice that backs them up

You are the face of engineering to customers when it matters. That means you communicate with clarity, you don't overpromise, and you follow through without exception.

What You Need to Have Done Before

Non-negotiable :

- Led an engineering team of 6 - 15 engineers in a high-growth product company - you've hired, developed, and when necessary, made hard calls on performance

- Shipped complex software products on schedule with a high quality bar - not once, but repeatedly. You have a track record, not a theory

- Managed engineers across multiple technical disciplines - backend, frontend, and ideally AI or data-heavy systems

- Owned platform reliability directly - you've defined SLOs, run incident responses, and made engineering prioritization decisions to protect stability

- Worked directly with product management on roadmap and sprint execution - not just attended the meetings, but shaped the outcomes

- Engaged with customers in a technical capacity - escalations, architectural discussions, trust-building conversations where you represented engineering

- Managed in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift and ambiguity is the norm - and kept the team productive and grounded through it

Strong advantage :

- Background as a software engineer yourself - you've written production code, reviewed architecture, and you know what hard looks like from the inside

- Experience managing teams building AI, agent, or ML systems - you understand the non-deterministic nature of these systems and what "quality" means when the output isn't always the same

- Worked in developer tooling, QA infrastructure, or platform engineering - you understand what it means to build something other engineers depend on

- Experience in a company that went through significant scaling - you've seen what breaks when a team doubles and you know how to build ahead of that

- Direct involvement in GTM motions - pre-sales, customer onboarding, enterprise escalation management

- Familiarity with CI/CD, test infrastructure, or software quality tooling - relevant domain knowledge that helps you make better decisions

How You Lead :

You lead by standard, not by presence. The team knows what good looks like because you've shown them - in code reviews, in design discussions, in how you handle a production incident, in how you give feedback. You don't manage by tracking tasks. You manage by raising the floor of what everyone considers acceptable.

You have strong opinions about engineering culture : what makes a team fast, what makes a team reliable, what makes a team that can be trusted with high-stakes commitments. You've built that culture before and you know it doesn't happen by accident.

You give direct feedback. Not feedback wrapped in so many qualifications it loses its meaning. Not feedback delivered only in performance reviews. Real-time, specific, actionable - the kind that makes engineers better.

You protect the team from distraction and you hold them accountable for outcomes. Both. At the same time. That tension is part of the job and you don't collapse it in either direction.

What You Are Not :

- Manages through status reports and JIRA velocity metrics

- Treats customer escalations as someone else's problem

- Needs a stable environment to manage well - if ambiguity paralyzes you, this will be hard

- Separates "delivery" from "quality" as competing concerns

- Has never had to make a hard call on headcount, scope, or timeline under pressure

- Thinks engineering management means being the most senior person in the room who doesn't write code, rather than the person most accountable for what the team produces

The Standard We Hold :

No excuses. This phrase means something specific here. It doesn't mean we expect perfection or that we don't acknowledge reality. It means : when something goes wrong, the first question is "what did we learn and what are we changing" - not "here's why it wasn't our fault." Accountability is assumed, not negotiated.

High ownership means the outcome is yours. Not the tasks. The outcome. If a customer is experiencing instability, that's your problem to solve - even if the root cause is in a system three levels removed from your direct team. You find the path and you walk it.

Customer commitment is a promise. When your team makes a commitment to a customer - delivery date, reliability target, feature scope - that commitment is treated like a contract. You scope carefully so commitments are real. And when reality changes, you communicate early, not after the deadline passes.

The Culture :

Fast, high-stakes, high-trust. We make decisions quickly and we trust the people in the room to make them well. That trust is earned and it's maintained by following through. Every time.

Founding team proximity is real. You will work directly with the founders - not through layers of management, not in quarterly business reviews. In real decisions, in real time. That means your judgment will be tested and your perspective will matter. It also means there's nowhere to hide.

We build for depth. The platform we're building has a compounding moat - the Context Graph gets smarter, the agents get more calibrated, the coverage intelligence gets deeper. That long-term thinking shows up in how we architect, how we staff, and how we make trade-offs. We're not optimizing for the demo. We're optimizing for the platform that customers stake their releases on two years from now.

High growth means the map keeps changing. The team you manage in month six will look different from month one. The technical priorities will shift. The customer base will grow and what they need will evolve. The best managers here are the ones who stay oriented by outcomes rather than plans.

What We Offer :

- Senior leadership compensation benchmarked to high-growth product companies

- Meaningful equity at a stage where it compounds

- Direct partnership with the founding team on engineering strategy and people decisions

- The opportunity to build and lead one of the most technically ambitious engineering teams in the QA space

- Real customer impact - the platform you maintain is what engineering teams at growing companies use to ship with confidence

Skills

Agentic AI, Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Graph, Engineering Management, AI Architecture