Software Engineering Manager

Nylon; Auckland; On-site; NZD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Nylon is building AI research tools that transform how lawyers and accountants work. We're growing quickly and seeking our first Engineering Manager to lead the engineers building the Nylon product and to shape the team around them.

You will own product engineering for the Core Nylon experience, drive delivery with product, source top talent, set engineering standards, and grow squads as we scale.

Qualifications

• 3+ years managing software engineers in a high growth SAAS environment.
• Hands-on with AI tooling and development workflows.
• Experience establishing operational excellence in engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Manage Nylon engineers: 1:1s, growth plans, performance and leveling.
• Own delivery, ensure squads ship against plan with early trade-off visibility.
• Hire senior-heavy team with Talent Lead on sourcing.
• Set engineering standards: code review, release quality, on-call and postmortems.
• Stand up squads as team grows: Core, Auth & Billing, Growth.
• Stay close to the work: review PRs, design reviews, pager shifts without blocking code.

Skills

People management

SAAS engineering

AI tooling awareness

Delivery leadership

Tools

Node.js

PostgreSQL

AWS

Terraform

Jest

Docker

Datadog

GitHub Actions CI/CD

React

Job description

Nylon builds AI research tools that are changing how lawyers and accountants work. 2,000+ firms across New Zealand, Australia and the UK trust our platform, from the biggest firms in the world to small specialist practices. Backed by Australasia's top VCs, we're expanding into the new markets while deepening our position in the UK and Australia.

Our engineering team is about to grow quickly. We're looking for our first Engineering Manager to lead the engineers building the Nylon product and to build the team around them.

The role

You'll own product engineering for the Core Nylon experience: the research and answer experience, identity and billing, growth. You'll own line management, delivery and hiring for this group.

The team is small tody, with a handful of passionate engineers and a funded hiring plan for you to build out your team and populate new capability squads.

What you'll be doing

• Managing the Nylon engineers: 1:1s, growth plans, performance and levelling against our six-level engineering framework

• Owning delivery, so squads ship predictably against a plan agreed with product and trade-offs are surfaced early

• Hiring a senior-heavy team, working with our Talent Lead on sourcing.

• Setting the engineering bar: code review, release quality, on-call, incident response and postmortems that change how we work

• Standing up squads as the team grows (Core, Auth & Billing, Growth)

• Staying close to the work: reading PRs, sitting in design reviews and taking a turn on the pager, without being the critical path for code

About you

• You've managed software engineers for 3+ years in a high growth SAAS environment.

• You're still technical and occassionally hands on through new AI development tooling

• You treat operational excellence as a management discipline, not something that happens to whoever is on call

• You already use AI tooling (we're passionate Claude Code builders) and have views on what it changes about how engineering teams should be shaped

Stack

• Node.js

• PostgreSQL

• AWS

• Terraform

• Jest

• Docker

• Datadog

• GitHub Actions CI/CD

• React