Principal Engineering Design

You will lead the engineering team. To start, that is a small group of senior ICs working on the Wren runtime, the compliance system, and the per-building record. Your job is to make that team better at its work, to protect it from the kind of pressure that turns careful engineering into shipped-and-forgotten product, and to keep the team honest about what the system does and does not do.

This is a hands-on manager role at a small company. You will write design documents. You will review code when it helps. You will also be the person who absorbs the cost of saying no, and who defends a slower schedule when the alternative is shipping something an architect would not sign.

You will be the primary interface between engineering and the licensed reviewers who use the product, and you will make sure their feedback reaches the people who can act on it.

In your first year you will hire two or three engineers carefully, set the review standard for the codebase, and establish the writing-before-building norm that keeps the team honest. You will own the way the engineering team coordinates with research and with our licensed reviewers, which is where most of the value of this company is actually produced. That means saying out loud when a project has lost its purpose, killing work that should be killed, and making sure that what we ship matches what we said we were going to ship. Eight or more years in engineering, with at least three years managing senior ICs on work that had to be correct. You have been the engineering manager on a system whose failures were consequential. Prior management experience at a small company where engineering sat inside a regulated or safety-critical domain. Senior engineering-manager compensation, early-stage equity on a standard four-year schedule, full health and dental, 401(k) with match, five weeks of paid time off, and an office in lower Manhattan.