Engineering Manager, Core Product Engineering

BackOps AI

$150K — $180K *
Enterprise Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years managing engineers with a hands-on engineering background
  • Strong grounding in software engineering fundamentals
  • Proven track record of shipping quality software predictably
  • Strong product and design instincts with active participation in design reviews
  • Experience in building LLMs or AI agents in production
  • Proactive AI-first engineering approach using coding agents
  • Effective communication skills with diverse stakeholders

Responsibilities

  • Hire, lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of product engineers
  • Own the evolution of the BackOps core product and its reusable workflows
  • Manage the software development lifecycle including architecture, code review, and testing
  • Ensure predictable delivery and high engineering quality in products
  • Collaborate closely with Product and Design teams to ship and measure products
  • Engage with customers and design partners to adapt the product to evolving needs
  • Drive planning and evaluation of AI agents for improved team fluency

Benefits

  • Competitive salary and meaningful equity
  • Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
  • 401(k) plan, disability insurance, and life insurance
  • Flexible time off
  • Daily meals in the office, and regular team events and offsites
Full Job Description
The Role

Core Product Engineering sits at the core of BackOps, building the product that turns complex supply-chain operations into reusable workflow automations. We are seeking an engineering leader to guide a team of product engineers building the systems our customers run their operations on.

This role is for leaders who think in products as much as in systems. This product area does not have settled patterns yet, so a large part of this job is product and design thinking done alongside Product and Design, not execution handed down from a roadmap. You should want to be close to the work: read code, sit in design reviews, and hold a high bar on how the software gets built.

Your Impact

In this role, you will own the evolution of BackOps core product, making sure it meets the next wave of customer scale, quality, and reliability needs. You will partner with product, design, and customers to deliver software that ships predictably and holds up in production.

  • Hire, Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of product engineers.
  • Own the evolution of BackOps core product: the reusable workflow automations customers run their operations on, and the product surface end to end.
  • Own the software development lifecycle end to end: architecture and design, code review, testing, release, and what happens in production afterward.
  • Drive predictable delivery and raise the engineering quality bar. Be accountable for what ships, when it ships, and how well it holds up.
  • Partner with Product and Design in a tight, fast loop. Bring your own product opinions, decide quickly, ship, and measure.
  • Work directly with customers and design partners. Their operations change constantly, and the product has to change with them.
  • Drive how we plan, evaluate, and improve our AI agents, and build the team's fluency in doing it.
  • Champion reliability, safety, and performance of the systems running in live customer environments.


What We're Looking For

  • 5+ years managing engineers, on top of a strong hands-on engineering background.
  • Deep grounding in software engineering fundamentals: system design, code quality, testing, and release practice. You can go deep with your engineers on a design decision.
  • A track record of shipping quality software predictably, and of raising the engineering standard of a team.
  • Strong product and design instincts. You can hold your own in a design review and you bring your own opinions about what the product should do.
  • Experience building with LLMs or AI agents in production, and a clear view on how to tell whether they are working.
  • A genuine AI-first approach to engineering. You use coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex) in your own workflow and you can teach it.
  • Comfortable when requirements evolves and the right answer is not known yet.
  • Clear written and verbal communication with engineers, designers, customers, and founders.


Nice to Have

  • Depth in evals, agent orchestration, multi-agent architectures, or RAG in production.
  • Zero-to-one experience: built a product from an idea to product-market fit.
  • Built with design partners, where the customer is in the loop weekly.
  • Grown a team through a step change in size, and hired well while doing it.
  • Exposure to operationally complex industries (logistics, supply chain, manufacturing, retail).


What Success Looks Like

  • Every cross-team initiative has an owner, a definition of done, and a status you can trust.
  • Intake has a front door, and unplanned work is measured weekly rather than estimated once a year.
  • The org plans and re-plans without it being an event.
  • Escalation paths are designed, written down, and used in a real incident.
  • Systemic problems get fixed once rather than escalated repeatedly.
  • Leadership makes decisions on current information without anyone assembling it by hand.


Rewards

  • Competitive salary and meaningful equity.
  • Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.
  • 401(k) plan, disability insurance, and life insurance.
  • Flexible time off.
  • Daily meals in the office, and regular team events and offsites.

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