Engineering Manager

Our client is a Y Combinator backed infrastructure company behind one of the most widely adopted open source projects in AI: the gateway that lets engineering teams call every major large language model provider through a single unified API. They are past $10M in ARR, meaningfully profitable, and growing exponentially on a deliberately lean team. Their software sits in the critical path for engineering organizations at some of the most recognizable names in technology, public research, and commerce. Revenue this strong at this stage means no pressure to raise and no pressure to compromise on the open source mission. The role They are hiring their first Engineering Manager to own how the team ships: engineering productivity, code quality, release health, hiring, and enterprise escalations, reporting directly to the founder and CTO. This is director-level scope on a small, high-leverage team. What you'll do Own the team's goals and hold engineers accountable to their own metrics, so the team ships what it commits to Stand up reliability and productivity tracking from scratch (MTTR, regression rate, ship rate) and use it to drive measurable improvement Own release health as the team moves fast: run root cause analysis, drive regressions down, and run a weekly quality sync Co‑own the technical roadmap with the CTO, including a Rust migration already in flight, keeping large changes gradual and well architected Own enterprise escalations end to end with clear plans, crisp updates, and fast resolution paths Analyze capacity needs, define roles, and hire engineers to scale the team while protecting open source community adoption What we're looking for 5 to 10 years in engineering management, shipping production systems with Python A track record of managing and shipping through a team, with real skill in goal setting and incident management Still a hands‑on coder: actively building and troubleshooting, not purely running process Has stood up reliability or productivity metrics (MTTR, regression rate, ship rate) and used them to move a number Has run postmortems and driven recurrence rates down Comfortable in a small company with high autonomy and genuine ambiguity CS or engineering degree, or an equivalent hands‑on engineering background Background in developer tools, open source, or AI infrastructure TypeScript experience, or exposure to Rust Has owned enterprise escalations directly with customers and kept their trust through a critical incident Compensation and benefits $250K to $300K base salary Location On‑site in San Francisco, CA Visa sponsorship is not available for this role #J-18808-Ljbffr