Engineering Manager

Gravitate AI; Dallas (TX); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Gravitate AI in Dallas is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead cross-functional pods on their fuel logistics platform. The ideal candidate will balance engineering responsibilities with team management, ensuring productivity and growth within the team.

Key responsibilities include running effective team rituals, solving blockers, and maintaining technical engagement. Candidates should have over 2 years in engineering management and a strong technical background to contribute to product development.

Qualifications

• Minimum 2 years of engineering management experience with a team of more than 4 engineers.
• Strong technical foundation equivalent to a Senior Software Engineer.
• Effective skills in managing scope and trade-offs with product owners.

Responsibilities

• Own and run team rituals like standups and retrospectives.
• Partner with product owner to manage team priorities.
• Remove blockers for engineers and communicate issues upward.

Skills

Engineering management experience

Technical foundation

Strong communication skills

Agile development practices

Problem-solving

Education

Experience in a tech company

Tools

Python

React/TypeScript

MongoDB

Kubernetes

GCP or Azure

Job description

If you are considering this role, you are someone who has discovered that your highest leverage isn’t just in the code you write – it’s in making the people around you better. You’re a credible technical voice your team respects, and you’re learning how to use that credibility to multiply the team’s output rather than carry it alone.

This is an Engineering Manager role. You’ll own 1–2 cross‑functional pods of engineers, partnering closely with a product owner to ship work that matters in Gravitate’s fuel logistics platform. Your job is to keep the team healthy, the delivery moving, and each person on the team growing.

You’re expected to stay technically engaged – reviewing code and designs, leading incident triage, contributing code at a senior engineer level. At the same time, you’re becoming an expert in the craft of team management: running tight rituals, giving clear feedback, hiring well, and managing performance when it counts.

We’re strongly against artificial separations of responsibility and throwing work “over the wall.” As an engineering manager here, you’re part of the product team – not a gatekeeper between engineering and product.

You’re an Ideal Candidate If

• You’re a player‑coach. You still have enough technical depth to review code, write code, evaluate designs, and debug production issues alongside your team. You’re not just managing – you’re contributing.
• You ship. You take personal ownership of your team’s commitments. When things get stuck, you unstick them – whether that means reprioritizing with product, unblocking an engineer one‑on‑one, or jumping into the code.
• You’re a clear, kind communicator. You give feedback early and directly. Your 1:1s are useful to the people in them. You translate business context to the team and team context to leadership, without spinning either.
• You’re building your leadership craft. You’re in the process of learning how to hire well, manage performance at both ends of the spectrum, and create a team environment where people do their best work. You’re receptive to coaching and actively growing.
• You genuinely care about your people. You notice when someone is struggling before they say it. You invest in their growth not because it’s on a checklist but because it matters to you.

Duties/Responsibilities

• Own and run your team’s rituals – standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, and backlog grooming – keeping them tight, purposeful, and actually useful.
• Partner with your product owner to manage scope, priorities, and trade‑offs; translate business context into what the team needs to know to do good work. You should be able to build a strong understanding of our product, the industry, and the customer to be a partner to your product counterpart.
• Remove blockers for your engineers – whether that’s a dependency, a design ambiguity, or a process that’s getting in the way.
• Participate in and facilitate technical design reviews; ensure designs meet quality standards and reflect product and business context from your domain.
• Stay code‑active at a senior level: reviewing PRs, contributing to production code, and maintaining the technical credibility to have real conversations with your team.
• Lead incident triage and response for your product area; own retrospectives that actually improve things.
• Drive monitoring, observability, and performance health in your team’s product area.
• Deliver clear, timely feedback to every engineer on your team; conduct regular 1:1s focused on growth, blockers, and wellbeing.
• Hire well for your team – partner with recruiting, define the bar, and own the process from screen to close.
• Manage performance proactively – recognize and reward strong contributors; address underperformance directly and constructively.
• Communicate team status, risks, and blockers upward to engineering leadership on a regular cadence.

Required Qualifications

• 2+ years of engineering management experience in a tech company with a team of > 4 engineers.
• Strong technical foundation – equivalent depth to a Senior Software Engineer. Comfortable reviewing code, evaluating architecture, and debugging production issues.
• Experience partnering closely with a product owner or product manager to manage scope, trade‑offs, and delivery.
• Track record of keeping a team’s delivery on track – not just observing, but actively removing blockers and managing priorities.
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to give feedback clearly and kindly, and to represent your team up and down the organization.
• Self‑aware and coachable – someone who actively seeks feedback and is honest about where they’re still growing.
• Familiar with agile development practices and experienced running sprint rituals effectively.

Nice to Have Experience

• Experience managing engineers in a B2B SaaS or enterprise software environment.
• Background in a logistics, supply chain, or energy/fuel domain.
• Experience growing engineers from junior through mid‑level.
• Hands‑on experience with our stack: Python, React/TypeScript, MongoDB, Kubernetes, GCP or Azure.
• Experience using LLM / agentic coding tools (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, etc.) and a genuine curiosity about how AI tooling is changing the way engineering teams work.
• Comfort with incident management and on‑call culture in a production SaaS environment.