Engineering Manager

Role Description

As a Mason Manager (Engineering Manager), you will lead multiple pods of Junior + Senior Masons responsible for building and shipping production automation and agentic systems for customers. This is a highly technical people leadership role. You will be accountable for what your pods ship: architecture decisions, quality bars, reliability, documentation, and delivery outcomes. You’ll also invest heavily in hiring, coaching, and performance management — building a team that can deliver at scale with consistent craft. You are not a “process-only” manager. You will stay close to the work: reviewing designs, unblocking complex integrations, setting engineering standards, and acting as the escalation point for production issues and delivery risk.

Responsibilities

• Lead multiple Mason pods and own delivery outcomes: scope, milestones, quality, and on-time execution
• Translate ambiguous customer/internal requests into clear plans, acceptance criteria, and execution strategy
• Set and enforce production-quality standards for Mason builds (testing, monitoring, runbooks, documentation, rollout plans)
• Serve as technical escalation for difficult problems: auth/permissions, integrations, data modeling, reliability, and failure recovery
• Establish and evolve team processes: scoping discipline, QA gates, review checklists, incident/postmortem loops, and continuous improvement
• Drive prioritization and capacity planning across pods; identify the critical path and remove blockers fast
• Partner with Delivery Leads and stakeholders to manage tradeoffs, timelines, and expectations (including client-facing escalations when needed)
• Hire and build the team: define roles, run interview loops, calibrate, close candidates, and improve onboarding
• Manage performance: set expectations, deliver feedback, coach growth, and handle underperformance clearly and fairly
• Develop leaders within the Mason org: mentoring, delegation, and building strong ownership at every level

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building production systems as a software/automation engineer
• 2+ years of engineering management or tech-leadership experience (people management strongly preferred)
• Experience managing multiple concurrent workstreams (pods/squads) with shared standards and predictable delivery
• Deep comfort with integrations: APIs, webhooks, auth (OAuth/API keys), and data stores (Postgres/Supabase)
• Ability to reason about reliability in automation/agentic systems: idempotency, retries/backoff, rate limits, auditing, and safe failure modes
• Strong quality mindset: unit/integration/E2E testing, regression prevention, monitoring/observability, and runbook culture
• Experience with applied AI delivery patterns: prompt iteration, eval harnesses, human-in-the-loop QA, and LLM observability
• Enjoyment of people management with real examples of coaching, feedback, and performance management
• Experience running hiring loops end-to-end: defining roles, interviewing, calibration, and closing candidates
• Clear and fluent communication in English — written and verbal — with the ability to align technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Ability to thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and take ownership without being asked

What Success Looks Like

• Multiple Mason pods ship production AI Employees predictably, with clear milestones and minimal thrash
• Builds are reliable in the wild: fewer incidents, fast recovery, strong observability, and durable runbooks/SOPs
• Engineering standards are consistently applied across pods (testing, documentation, QA gates, and design clarity)
• Stakeholders have high trust: timelines and tradeoffs are communicated early and crisply
• The Mason org scales through strong hiring and onboarding; new Masons ramp quickly and ship meaningful work
• Team performance improves over time through coaching, clear expectations, and a high-accountability culture