Engineering Manager

Sharpe Recruiting Ventures; New York (NY); On-site; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental coverage

401(k) with employer match

Fully paid commuter benefits

Lunch and dinner in the office

Job summary

Sharpe Recruiting Ventures is helping a client in New York City recruit an Engineering Manager for Core Infrastructure. You will own the health, direction, and delivery of the team, setting priorities, shaping architecture, and coaching engineers while staying close enough to code to contribute credibly.

You will partner with product and solutions teams, drive reliability and operational metrics, and build a team that self-organizes around problems.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building production software with a startup track record.
• Experience owning a team's delivery and growing ICs into engineers.
• Strong architecture sense and ability to discuss tradeoffs credibly.
• Clear written communication across distributed teams.

Responsibilities

• You will own health, direction, and delivery of the Core Infrastructure team.
• Set clear priorities and a roadmap aligned with business goals.
• Raise the bar on execution quality and reduce regressions.
• Build a self-organizing team and foster shared ownership.
• Coach and develop engineers with timely, constructive feedback.
• Define SLIs/SLOs and improve reliability and tech debt management.
• Collaborate with go-to-market, solutions, and customer teams as needed.

Skills

Leadership

Architecture

Mentoring

Communication

Tools

AI tooling

Job description

Engineering Manager, Core Infrastructure

New York, NY | Engineering / Full Time / In Office

About the Company:

Our client builds mission critical infrastructure that helps the world's largest digital platforms stay true to what they stand for. The internet has always been abused by bad actors, and AI is making it exponentially worse, driving fraud, abuse, and manipulation at a scale and speed no human team can fight alone. The company gives platforms a single system to write and enforce policy, deploy AI agents against abuse in real time, investigate threats, meet their regulatory reporting obligations, and prove their programs are working.

Their customers are some of the largest internet platforms in the world. The decisions made inside this software directly determine what stays up, what comes down, and how users are treated.

This is a small, fast moving team backed by top tier venture investors. They care about being intentional, direct, and deeply focused on solving real customer problems.

Why This Role:

The Core Infrastructure team builds the platform and infrastructure that judges the safety of much of the user generated content on the internet. This work requires extreme focus and ruthless prioritization. There are talented engineers working across agents, workflows, review tooling, platform reliability, and data, but execution quality and prioritization still depend too much on individuals self managing their priorities rather than teams that run themselves. The company is hiring an Engineering Manager to own the Core Infrastructure team end to end: to set clear priorities, raise the bar on execution quality and speed, and turn a group of strong ICs into a team that self organizes around problems.

Management is the heart of this role, but it is not a process only job. Most of your time will go into leading, coaching, and unblocking your team, while you stay close enough to the code to contribute directly, lead architecture discussions credibly, and earn your engineers' trust as a technical peer. You will report to the Head of Engineering and have real influence on how engineering leadership gets built out as the org scales.

What You'll Work On:

You will own the health, direction, and delivery of the Core Infrastructure team. In practice that means:

• Setting clear priorities and a roadmap your team understands. Engineers should know what they're working on, why it matters to the business, and what the team is choosing not to do. You will bring the business context behind the work and translate it into focused execution.
• Raising the bar on team level execution quality. Not just shipping features, but shipping them with fewer regressions, clear ownership, and no last minute surprises. You will find the inefficiencies slowing your team down and fix them before they become someone's bad on call week.
• Building a team that self organizes. Individual heroics create single points of failure and burnout risk. You will grow and evolve a team that can triage and share work across itself and with other teams.
• Coaching and developing engineers. You will set clear expectations against role and provide direct, constructive feedback promptly and empathetically. People should always know how they're progressing and where they need to grow.
• Driving operational rigor proactively. Helping define SLIs and SLOs for your team's systems, and getting ahead of reliability and tech debt problems before they turn into incidents.
• Acting as the default liaison to go to market, solutions, and customer facing partner teams, and picking up technical work alongside your team when it helps, without becoming a blocker.

What We're Looking For:

• 8+ years building production software with at least 4 years in a startup environment, managing platform engineers directly. You've owned a team's delivery, not just your own, and you've grown ICs into stronger engineers.
• Deep familiarity with high throughput, data intensive systems, workflow and automation engines, or AI powered platforms in production, with experience managing full stack engineers.
• A track record of turning a group of individual contributors into a high performing team: clear priorities, shared ownership, and execution that doesn't depend on any one person.
• Strong enough technically to earn your team's trust. You can lead architecture and tradeoff discussions, review work credibly, and jump into the code when it helps. The team uses AI tooling extensively and expects you to be fluent and opinionated about how it changes the way teams build.
• Experience setting roadmaps and priorities in an ambiguous, fast moving environment, and the judgment to decide what to deprioritize, not just what to do.
• A real point of view on what high performing engineering teams look like and how to measure them, with experience driving reliability, quality, or operational metrics like DORA.
• You give direct, constructive feedback as a matter of course, and you deliver it in a way people can act on.
• Clear written communication. This is a distributed team concentrated in NYC that works closely with customer facing teams. You write clearly in PRs, Slack, planning docs, and cross functional updates.

Nice to Have:

• Experience in Trust and Safety, abuse prevention, fraud, or risk. Understanding how attackers exploit platforms gives you a head start.
• Experience operating at the Product and Engineering boundary, or in a customer facing engineering capacity.

Location and Benefits:

Based in NYC, with relocation available for the right person. The team believes in working together in person and holds at least two company wide events per year. Benefits include health, vision, and dental coverage, a 401(k) plan with employer matching, fully paid commuter benefits, and a fully stocked office with paid lunch and dinner.