Engineering Manager

Slang; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 211,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Equity compensation

Professional development

Flexible hours

Job summary

Slang AI in New York City is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead one to two pods building our voice AI platform for the restaurant industry. You will recruit, coach, and grow engineers while maintaining a healthy delivery rhythm across cross-functional teams.

You will review designs, participate in architecture discussions, and help ensure production-ready systems. This role combines people leadership with hands-on strategic input and a strong focus on AI-enabled development.

Qualifications

• 3+ years managing software engineering teams (direct reports, hiring, performance management) and 5+ years hands-on software engineering.
• Own delivery outcomes: planning, estimation, prioritization, and shipping in a fast-moving product environment.
• Experience hiring and growing engineers with career development plans.
• Strong technical judgment in backend or distributed systems and architectural reviews.
• Experience managing distributed or remote teams, ideally across time zones.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to deliver tough messages with care.
• AI fluency: actively use AI tools in daily work and guide teams on responsible adoption.
• Experience with conversational AI, real-time voice, telephony, or LLM-powered products is a plus.
• Experience at a startup or growth-stage company is desirable.
• Familiarity with Google Cloud Platform is a plus.
• Experience partnering with Product and Design in a pod/squad model is valuable.
• Interest in the restaurant and hospitality domain.

Responsibilities

• Lead one to two delivery pods building our voice AI for restaurants, from real-time phone agents to integrations used daily.
• Own the health and output of teams: hiring, coaching, and developing engineers; maintain a predictable delivery rhythm.
• Balance feature delivery with reliability, on-call health, and technical debt across the stack.
• Review designs and code, ask critical questions in architecture discussions, and know when to defer to senior engineers.
• Partner with product managers, conversation designers, and customer-facing teams to align work with business goals.
• Join leadership ceremonies and collaborate with leaders who value trust-based processes and psychological safety.

Skills

Team management

Hands-on engineering

Delivery ownership

Hiring engineers

Communication

AI fluency

Remote team leadership

Architectural review

Job description

About Slang AI

Slang AI is redefining customer engagement through conversational AI. Our mission is to transform the restaurant industry with the ultimate voice AI solution for consistently outstanding guest experiences.

We believe how we build matters as much as what we build. Our culture is rooted in our values, so every “Slangsta” feels valued, supported, and connected to the impact of our work on the future of restaurants.

How We Use AI in Hiring

Slang AI uses AI tools to help review applications, and a person makes every hiring decision. No one is rejected by AI alone: a member of our team reviews your actual application before any decision. To learn more about how we use AI, to ask for a person to review your application without an AI step, or to request an accommodation, let your recruiter know.

Using AI During Your Application

You’re welcome to use AI tools to prepare, for example to polish your résumé or practice interview questions. During live interviews and assessments, please don’t use AI tools to generate your answers unless we say it’s allowed. To make sure we’re speaking with you, we’ll ask you to have your camera on for at least one live interview. If you can’t use a camera, let us know and we’ll find another way.

Equal Opportunity at Slang

Slang AI is an equal opportunity employer. We hire based on qualifications, merit, and business need. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship or immigration status, age, disability, pregnancy, marital or partnership status, caregiver status, genetic information, military or veteran status, height, weight, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. We consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records in a manner consistent with the NYC Fair Chance Act and applicable law. If you need a reasonable accommodation at any point in the application or interview process, let your recruiter know.

What Your Experience Will Be

You’ll join Slang as an Engineering Manager leading one to two of our delivery pods, the cross-functional teams that build our voice AI for restaurants, from real-time phone agents to the integrations and tools operators use every day. You’ll own the health and output of your teams: hiring, coaching, and growing engineers; running a delivery rhythm that ships predictably; and making sure what we build is reliable enough for a restaurant to trust with its phones on a Friday night. Your week will blend 1:1s and career conversations, cycle planning with your product partner, design reviews, unblocking cross-team dependencies, and time in the details of production when something needs your attention.

You’ll manage a team of roughly five to eight engineers spanning backend, platform, and applied AI work, distributed across the US and Brazil. You’ll partner closely with product managers, conversation designers, and customer-facing teams, and you’ll work within the execution frameworks we’ve built (technical project planning templates, project lead responsibilities) while helping them get better over time. You don't need to write production code daily, but you'll review designs and code, ask the right questions in architecture discussions, and know when to defer to your senior engineers.

You’ll report to leaders who have built and scaled engineering and product teams and who believe in trust-based process, directness, and psychological safety. You’ll join key team ceremonies. The role is hybrid from New York City (3 days a week in our NYC office), with regular collaboration across time zones.

Why You Belong Here and How You Will Grow

We believe management is a craft, not a promotion. Here, a great manager is measured by how their people grow and how reliably their team delivers, not by how many meetings they run. Our culture values low ego, directness with care, and finishing what we start. We “Be a Good Host” for each other the same way we do for restaurants: we assume positive intent, we make space for hard conversations, and we treat the experience of working here as everyone's responsibility.

You’ll belong here if you love building teams where engineers raise problems without fear, disagree openly, and then commit. You’ll find a leadership team that wants your input on how we work, not just your execution of it. You’ll help shape how our distributed engineering org hires, levels, and develops talent, and your fingerprints will be on the culture we carry forward.

As you grow, you'll have a clear path toward Senior Engineering Manager: managing multiple teams, developing tech leads and managers, and owning operational objectives across the org. You'll get close exposure to engineering strategy, team planning, and AI-augmented ways of working, and you'll be supported with coaching and real ownership rather than a checklist.

What Success Looks Like

• You will build a high-functioning team: every engineer has a concrete growth plan, gets regular actionable feedback, and underperformance is addressed early, directly, and fairly.
• You will make your teams' delivery predictable: cycle commitments are realistic and met, risks surface early, and stakeholders are never surprised.
• You will balance feature delivery with reliability, on-call health, and technical debt, and your teams will own the operational health (observability, on-call readiness) of the systems they build.
• You will hire well: you'll run strong, calibrated loops, close great candidates, and onboard new engineers so they're contributing within their first cycles.
• You will partner with Product to shape scope and sequencing, not just receive it, and help your engineers understand the business context behind the work.
• You will create a healthy team culture across time zones, with rituals (1:1s, retros, planning) that keep a distributed team connected and psychologically safe.
• You will set clear expectations for responsible AI-assisted development on your teams and track how AI tooling affects quality and delivery speed.

What You Will Bring

Required

• 3+ years managing software engineering teams (direct reports, hiring, performance management), with 5+ years of prior hands‑on software engineering experience.
• A track record of owning delivery outcomes for a team: planning, estimation, prioritization, and shipping predictably in a fast‑moving product environment.
• Experience hiring and growing engineers, including building career development plans and handling underperformance with clarity and care.
• Strong technical judgment in backend or distributed systems: you can review designs, challenge trade‑offs, and guide decisions without becoming the bottleneck.
• Experience managing distributed or remote teams, ideally across time zones or countries.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, and the ability to deliver difficult messages (performance, priorities, change) with clarity and care.
• AI fluency: you actively use AI tools in your own daily work and have a point of view on how teams should adopt AI‑assisted development responsibly.

Preferred (nice to have)

• Experience with conversational AI, real‑time voice, telephony, or LLM‑powered products.
• Experience at a startup or growth‑stage company.
• Familiarity with Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience partnering closely with Product and Design in a pod or squad model.
• Interest in the restaurant and hospitality domain.

How Work Affects My Life

This role gives you real ownership over a team and its outcomes, with leaders who want you to succeed and the room to lead in your own style.

• Hybrid work from New York City: 3 days a week in our NYC office, with occasional travel to company offsites
• Competitive salary and equity package reflecting your expertise and contributions
• Comprehensive benefits including health, dental, and vision insurance
• Professional development opportunities to enhance your skills and career trajectory
• Contribute to a company mission that transforms the restaurant and hospitality industry
• Some flexibility in hours to overlap with teammates in Brazil

You’ll come away seeing leadership the way great restaurateurs see hospitality: the team's experience is the product.

Our Engineering Values

• Start Less, Finish More: Focus is a choice. We ruthlessly prioritize, ask "why" before committing, and say no early so we ship meaningful work instead of accumulating half‑finished efforts.
• Teamwork & Collaboration: Great engineering doesn't happen in isolation. We share knowledge and load, assume best intentions, and work with each other, not just alongside each other.
• Alignment & Communication: We move fast because we're aligned. We give feedback directly, speak up early, commit fully once a decision is made, and operate with low ego.
• Quality & Craft: Shortcuts compound. We test before we ship, manage tech debt deliberately, and right‑size solutions out of respect for the people who'll build on our work next.

Compensation & Location

Compensation for this role is benchmarked against local market data for the employee's primary work location. Total compensation includes a mix of cash and equity. The base salary range for this role is $190,000 to $211,000. Final pay depends on skills, experience, and location.

Work Location: New York City, hybrid (3 days a week in our NYC office)
Base Compensation: $190,000 – $211,000
Equity: Included in offer package

Our Vision

Calling a business shouldn’t feel like a robot-hostage situation: hold music, no human in sight, and a soulless voice repeating “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that.” (Shudder.) That’s why we started Slang AI. We use the latest AI and audio wizardry to make transacting by voice so enjoyable it’s more human than human. By 2030, we will save businesses and consumers 1 billion minutes and make voice the preferred way to communicate (it’s faster and easier than text).

Our team has built products at Spotify, BuzzFeed, the New York Times, and OpenTable that reached hundreds of millions of users. Now we’re building a culture that puts product and human-centered design first and never stops learning. Sound like you? Get on board.

Our Values

• AI Native. We don’t just sell AI. We are AI.
• Overachiever Fever. We’re overachievers (we don’t know any other way).
• Humility Ability. We approach each other with curiosity and openness (know‑it‑alls not welcome!).
• Be a Good Host. We build for hospitality. We should embody it.