What you'll work onYou'll own the health, direction, and delivery of the Core Infra team. In practice that means:
- Setting clear priorities and a roadmap your team understands. Engineers should know what they're working on, why it matters to the business, and what we're choosing not to do. You'll bring the business context behind the work and translate it into focused execution.
- Raising the bar on team-level execution quality. Not just shipping features, but shipping them with fewer regressions, clear ownership, and no last-minute surprises. You'll find the inefficiencies slowing your team down and fix them before they become someone's bad on-call week.
- Building a team that self-organizes. Individual heroics create single points of failure and burnout risk. You'll grow and evolve a team that can triage and share work across itself and with other teams.
- Coaching and developing engineers. You'll set clear expectations against role and provide direct, constructive feedback promptly and empathetically. People should always know how they're progressing and where they need to grow.
- Driving operational rigor proactively. Helping define SLIs/SLOs for your team's systems and getting ahead of reliability and tech-debt problems to get ahead of incidents.
- Acting as the default liaison to GTM, FDE, CX and other cross-functional partners, and picking up technical work alongside your team when it helps, without becoming a blocker.
What we're looking for- 8+ years building production software with at least 4 years in a startup environment, managing platform engineers directly. You've owned a team's delivery, not just your own, and you've grown ICs into stronger engineers.
- Deep familiarity with high-throughput, data-intensive systems, workflow/automation engines, or AI-powered platforms in production, with experience managing full stack engineers
- A track record of turning a group of individual contributors into a high-performing team: clear priorities, shared ownership, and execution that doesn't depend on any one person.
- Strong enough technically to earn your team's trust. You can lead architecture and trade-off discussions, review work credibly, and jump into the code when it helps. We use AI tooling extensively and expect you to be fluent and opinionated about how it changes the way teams build.
- Experience setting roadmaps and priorities in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment, and the judgment to decide what to deprioritize, not just what to do.
- A real point of view on what high-performing engineering teams look like and how to measure them, with experience driving reliability, quality, or operational metrics like DORA.
- You give direct, constructive feedback as a matter of course, and you deliver it in a way people can act on.
- Clear written communication. We're a distributed team concentrated in NYC and we work closely with customer-facing teams. You write clearly in PRs, Slack, planning docs, and cross-functional updates.
Nice to have- Experience in Trust & Safety or abuse prevention. Understanding how attackers exploit platforms gives you a head start.
- Experience operating at the Product Engineering boundary, or in a customer-facing engineering capacity.
Location & BenefitsWe're based in NYC and will relocate for this role. We believe in working together in person and hold at least two all-company events per year. We offer health, vision & dental benefits, a 401(k) plan with employer matching, fully paid commuter benefits, and a fully stocked office with paid lunch and dinner.
