Engineering Manager

About This Role

We're looking for Engineering Managers to add to our growing core engineering team. This isn't a "manage the roadmap and attend standups" kind of role — you'll be in the code, shaping architecture, and doing hard technical work alongside your team. You'll set direction, grow engineers, drive execution, and keep the bar high. We’re looking for first-line managers who are ready to lead from the front.

The team you'll lead depends on fit. Each area is different in flavor, but the expectations for the EM role are consistent: technical depth, strong people instincts, and the ability to move fast without breaking the things that matter.

• User Experience — The team behind our web and SaaS pieces that the customers interact directly with. Tech stack: TypeScript, React, C/C++, Rust, and Nix/NixOS.
• Platform — This team owns internal and external developer experience, monitoring, reliability, and infrastructure-as-code, and they build and maintain Pangolin, our internal database. Tech Stack: C/C++, Rust, Nix, and Terraform.
• Autonomous Search — This team does deep research and systems development, owning the Fuzzer and Determinator Tech Stack: C/C++ and Rust.

What You'll Do

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of engineers who genuinely care about what they build and how they build it.
• Drive execution on complex, high-priority projects — keeping things moving without cutting corners that matter.
• Get your hands dirty — write and review code, weigh in on architecture, debug the hard stuff.
• Partner with technical leaders across the company to align your team's direction with broader product and engineering goals.
• Raise the bar on engineering practices: quality, reliability, and correctness. (We really mean it about correctness.)
• Build a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning.

What We're Looking For

• Strong engineering chops — comfortable in C++, Python, Java, Go, or similar. You don't need to know every language we use, but you do need to be genuinely good at programming.
• Experience with test infrastructure, or developer tooling is a major plus.
• Deep experience with distributed systems, databases, and large-scale architectures — ideally with some scars to prove it.
• Proven track record of leading engineering teams — recruiting, mentoring, and growing talent, ideally in a startup or high-growth environment.
• Strong technical judgment. You can make the right call on hard architectural questions and explain why clearly.
• Excellent communicator. You can align engineers, PMs, and executives around a shared direction without losing anyone along the way.
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity. We're early. Things change. You adapt.

About Our Team

Our team has backgrounds spanning traditional CS degrees, philosophy, mathematics, and everything in between — or nothing formal at all. What everyone shares is a high bar for engineering quality. Managers here are expected to meet that same bar: this isn't a role where you stop coding when you get the title. We also genuinely believe in in-person work. It's how we build trust, share knowledge, and figure out hard problems together. That's why this role is 5 days a week in our Northern Virginia office.