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 (software, ML, infra). This includes their growth, performance, well-being, and Tali's 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

• Grow technical leaders. You'll grow senior engineers into staff engineers. You'll shape what technical leadership means at Tali.
• Own outcomes end to end. Your team builds with PM, design, CS, and sales in the same room. No walls.
• Sustain urgency without burning people out. Calibrate the right level of energy and put it back into the system. Unblock people day in and day out: the small decisions on product, technology, and prioritization that keeps the team moving.
• Create clarity. Take a messy ambiguous situation, reduce it to the few most important things, and create clarity for the team to paddle in the same direction.
• Lead an AI-native team: we're re-inventing how work gets done. You'll shape how the team decomposes ambiguous goals into AI-executable work, eval what comes out, and identify leverage points for durable investments in AI infrastructure.
• Raise the bar and build a repeatable way of managing. We need someone who innovates on the craft, and has the operational mind to build repeatable systems used by others at Tali.

What we're looking for

• 7+ years of experience, including 3+ years managing engineers at the senior and staff level. You've effectively grown engineers on the technical leadership track. You've managed people who visibly grew, levelled up, got promoted, or went on to lead.
• Player-coach at a product company. You scaled a small, high-output team at a company that ships software to users, while staying close to the work. Technical depth is a must: you've shipped code or reviewed a pull request in the last few months. Ideally, you've built or reshaped how a team works (rituals, tooling, culture, process) to solve real business problems.
• 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.
• Model the system, not just symptom. When something is underperforming, you look past the obvious answer to the systemic cause.
• 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.
• You build with AI yourself. You've personally built, automated, or evaluated something with AI in production. You have a nuanced view on how the software development lifecycle changes because of AI.
• 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