Engineering Manager

Slang AI; New York (NY); Híbrido; USD 180.000 - 240.000; Jornada completa

Descripción de la vacante

Slang AI in New York City is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead one to two pods building our voice AI for restaurants, from real-time agents to integrations. You’ll own team health, hiring, and a delivery rhythm that ships reliably for busy Friday nights.

You’ll mentor engineers across backend, platform, and applied AI, review designs, and help the org scale. This role is hybrid from NYC with cross-time-zone collaboration.

Formación

• 3+ years managing software engineering teams (direct reports, hiring, performance management).
• 5+ years of prior hands-on software engineering experience.
• Track record of owning delivery outcomes: planning, estimation, prioritization, shipping.
• Experience hiring and growing engineers, including career development plans.
• Strong judgment in backend or distributed systems; review designs and guide decisions.
• Experience managing distributed or remote teams across time zones.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to deliver difficult messages clearly.
• AI fluency: actively use AI tools in your own practice.

Responsabilidades

• Lead one to two delivery pods of engineers across backend, platform, and AI work.
• Own health and output of teams: hiring, coaching, and growth, with a predictable delivery rhythm.
• Review designs and code, participate in architecture discussions, and unblock dependencies.
• Report to leaders; uphold trust-based processes and psychological safety.
• Work in a hybrid NYC office (3 days/week) with collaboration across time zones.

Conocimientos

People management

Hands-on software

Delivery ownership

Hiring & coaching

Technical judgment

Distributed/remote teams

Communication

AI fluency

Descripción del empleo

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 da