More about the Role

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to join our Platform team - the team that builds our self-serve developer platform (infrastructure, tools, processes, and education) that lets every engineer at Clipboard design, build, test, deploy, and secure software unreasonably fast and with uncomfortably high standards - increasingly for AI-augmented and AI-autonomous development. You'll co-own customer outcomes with product teams, and you'll lead with a genuinely customer-centric mindset: deeply understanding our engineering org's problems rather than taking feature requests at face value, and measuring success by real adoption and impact.

This is a hands-on leadership role. We expect our EMs to stay close enough to the work to reason about real tradeoffs in systems, infrastructure, deployments, reliability, and security. That means backing strong technical decisions and noticing when something doesn't feel right, even if you're not coding day-to-day. You'll balance technical direction, execution, and people development, coaching engineers so they keep growing while the team ships consistently.

Platform sees across all of engineering, so judgment and prioritization matter a lot. You'll decide where cross-cutting friction is worth centralizing, when to build the paved path versus letting teams solve their own problems, and how to get ahead of new opportunities and risks - including the ones AI-augmented and AI-autonomous development increasingly introduce (agent blast radius, credential exposure, contention in shared environments). The best person here can make clear calls amid ambiguity and keep the team focused on the work that actually moves engineering forward.

More about the Platform Team

Some problems don't belong to any one team. When no one owns them, everyone slows down. Deep technical work like databases, infrastructure, and deployments needs real experts. Reliability, performance, and security quietly degrade when they're nobody's job. Shared libraries and systems turn into nobody's responsibility.

The Platform team exists to take focused ownership of these problems so the business can move fast. Today we support an engineering, product, and design organization of around 100 people and growing. And the more teams we have, the more leverage there is in solving shared problems once and getting it right for everyone.

Concretely, our mandate is to solve cross-cutting problems once so every team benefits; build the common tools, process, and infrastructure (the "paved path") that reduce the work and cognitive load of shipping; own the hard tech and the non-functional work the business depends on; own shared systems like auth, notifications, and chat that all product engineering teams need; and set the guardrails that keep production safe, in partnership with our Security team.

What makes this team distinctive is how Clipboard is built around it. Our delivery teams own their areas end-to-end: building, testing, deploying, and operating, with no QA or DevOps layer in between. This provides our engineers complete autonomy and ownership that empowers them to move fast.

This is a high-leverage seat for an engineering leader who wants real scope now and room to grow as the team scales.

What we are looking for

We care less about polished narratives and more about how someone thinks through problems.A successful Engineering Manager at Clipboard demonstrates the following traits:

• First-principles Thinking: we value people who do not rely on past experience by default, but dive deep to understand what is actually going on before deciding what to do.
• Customer-centricity: we care about people who stay close to the customer and use that context to make decisions and prioritize work.
• Ownership and Judgement: we look for people who take responsibility for outcomes, make clear calls on what matters, and help teams move forward, treating their area like their own business.
• Technical Strength: we expect Engineering Managers to stay close enough to the work to understand tradeoffs, support good technical decisions, and know when something does not feel right.

The Interview Process

At Clipboard, we don't believe proxies are a reliable way to measure ability. We prefer to evaluate candidates by having them do work that closely resembles the actual job. Our process is designed around that:

1. Async Technical Design Document (TDD) Review, followed by a 1-hour discussion with our Engineering Leadership team
2. Async EM Scenario Exercise, followed by a 1-hour discussion with our Engineering Leadership team
3. Hiring Manager Interview with our CPO
4. Executive Interview with our co-CEO
5. Offer!

Quick Note on Scammers:

Clipboard would never ask you for money or your bank details to participate in our hiring process. Report any scammers impersonating the Clipboard hiring team members here.