Engineering Manager

Tali AI

• $180K — $230K *
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 7+ years of engineering experience, including 2+ years in a management role and 5+ years as an individual contributor.
  • Demonstrated ability to grow and develop team members, guiding them to promotions and leadership roles.
  • Experience in a startup or scale-up environment, with a technical depth across the engineering stack.
  • Proficient in reasoning from first principles and adapting best practices judiciously as needed.
  • Ability to provide and receive candid feedback with care, fostering a supportive work environment.
  • Familiarity with regulated industries such as healthcare or finance is a plus.

Responsibilities

  • Own team growth, performance evaluations, and talent management for engineers across software, machine learning, and infrastructure.
  • Lead project outcomes collaboratively with cross-functional teams including PM, design, customer support, and sales.
  • Consistently unblock team members by addressing small, day-to-day decisions affecting progress.
  • Coach individuals on personal and professional growth rather than solely focusing on task completion.
  • Clarify team goals by simplifying complex situations to a few actionable insights.
  • Analyze systemic issues causing underperformance and identify root causes beyond immediate symptoms.
  • Maintain urgency in projects while ensuring team members are not overworked, striking a balance in workload.
  • Innovate on team management practices, creating sustainable processes rather than merely running existing protocols.

Benefits

  • Flexible work hours.
  • Comprehensive health and wellness coverage from day one, including unlimited wellness days.
  • Competitive PTO with unique options like winter shutdown and additional long weekends.
  • $2000 annually in 'Knowledge Dollars' for personal and professional development.
  • Quarterly social events and outings to enhance team bonding beyond work.
Full Job Description
The role

We're hiring an Engineering Manager who reports to the VP of Engineering. You'll own people leadership for a group of our engineers: their growth, performance, well-being, and talent bar. You'll be implementing and shaping our engineering growth culture.

Your leverage in this role is people: building the team, delegating, developing the team's skills, removing systemic bottlenecks. The leaders we hire now will shape what Tali engineering becomes. You're comfortable diagnosing and solving problems with structure, process, tooling, or helping individuals change how they relate to their work, what they're afraid of, and what drives them.

This is a player-coach role. You are a strong engineer, you can stay close to technical work, or roll up your sleeves and do it if you judge that's the best use of your time.
What you'll do
  • Own growth, performance, 1:1s, and the talent bar for a team of engineers (software, ML, and infrastructure).
  • Own outcomes end to end. Your team builds with PM, design, CS, and sales in the same room. No walls, no throwing work over the fence.
  • Unblock people day in and day out: the small decisions on product, technology, and someone's growth that keep a team moving.
  • Coach the person, not just the work. Debug the root cause once, so the person ends up on a self-improving path.
  • Set clarity and context. Take a messy situation and boil it down to the few things the team must understand to paddle in the same direction.
  • Model the system, not the symptom. When something is underperforming, look past the obvious answer to the systemic cause: the flows, the bottlenecks, the rates of change, or how people work.
  • Sustain urgency without burning people out. Calibrate the right level of energy and put it back into the system.
  • Lead an AI-native team: contribute to re-inventing how work gets done in the software industry. Decompose ambiguous goals into AI-executable work, eval what comes out, identify leverage points for durable investments in AI infrastructure, and coach your team to do the same.
  • Raise the bar and build a repeatable way of managing. We need someone who innovates on the craft, not someone who runs ceremonies.
What we're looking for
  • 7+ years of experience in engineering, including 2+ as a manager and 5+ years as an IC engineer. You've managed people who visibly grew, levelled up, got promoted, or went on to lead. Ideally, you've built or reshaped how a team works (rituals, tooling, culture, process) to solve real business problems.
  • Player-coach at a startup or scale-up. You scaled a small, high-output team while staying close to the work. Technical depth across the stack is a must. You can still drop into technical work when that's the best use of your time.
  • You reason from first principles. Your use of best practices, frameworks, or playbooks is judicious. You're comfortable putting them aside when they're not a right fit. Your judgement is your ultimate source of value, and building the judgement of others is how you work through others.
  • Radical Candor. You can take hard feedback, sit with it, and change your mind if necessary. You can deliver hard feedback while remaining radically caring about the human on the other side. This is the trait we trust most.
  • Experience in a regulated industry is an asset (healthcare, finance, or similar).
Is this you?

You enjoy the art of delegation. You have a framework for coaching people. You think in sociotechnical systems. You'd rather change a team's culture than implement more processes. And you can feel at home in a ~40-person company that ships every day and doesn't wait for permission, not one with a big org with a big budget already built for you.
What success looks like

1 month: You've taken over 1:1s, growth, and performance for your team, and people already feel the clarity. You know each person's real strengths and real limiters, not just their project status.

3 months: Your reports are visibly growing. You've found and fixed a couple of team-level process problems. You've owned the end-to-end outcome of one initiative.

9 months: You're a proven leader in engineering. You've grown at least one person into a meaningfully larger scope. You're trusted to shape hiring, culture, and how we manage.
Working at Tali

Benefits

Flexible work hours

Comprehensive health and wellness coverage from day one, including unmetered wellness days

Competitive PTO, including winter shutdown Dec 25 - Jan 1, birthdays and Taliversaries, and 'extra long' long weekends

$2000 annually in "Knowledge Dollars" to learn, grow, and level up

Quarterly socials & company outings that bring our team together beyond the day-to-day

Our Core Values

Bold: we embrace ambitious goals, make courageous decisions, and take calculated risks to drive impactful innovation and growth

🧩 Resourceful: we're self-directed problem solvers; navigating obstacles, learning and acquiring new skills and making sound judgement calls. We consistently deliver on commitments while maintaining a high standard of quality and dependability

📣 Candid: Being, honest, transparent, and open in all interactions, fostering a culture of trust and authenticity

Caring: Actively supporting and empathizing with our people - customers, patients, and colleagues to help them thrive and achieve their goals

Tali Online

Tali is one of Linkedin's Top Startups of 2025

Tali is part of the renowned Digital Supercluster Project

Check out Tali's CEO, Mahshid Yassaei on Cherry Health's Leaders in Healthcare Podcast

$180,000 - $230,000 a year

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Tali AI

More Consumer Technology Jobs

Find similar Engineering Manager jobs: