Engineering Manager

Sylvan Labs; New York (NY); On-site; USD 250,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, and Vision

Parental Leave

Wellness stipend

Daily lunches

Take what you need vacation

Job summary

Sylvan Labs is seeking a senior engineering leader in New York to design and deliver production-grade revenue agents. You will begin as an IC for 3–6 months, then scale the team while continuing to ship.

You will own the core platform architecture, shape technical direction with the CTO, and influence ML strategy, hiring loops, and deployment patterns across a multi-time-zone team. Equity is offered with competitive cash compensation.

Qualifications

• Deep ML across eras: feature engineering, uplift and causal methods, time series, transformers.
• End-to-end delivery ownership, building scaffolding and leading teams.
• Fluency in agent-driven development practices and quality reviews.
• Inheriting and incrementally improving a legacy codebase.
• Experience managing people remotely across time zones.
• High tolerance for ambiguity and unglamorous work.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of production-grade revenue agents.
• Set engineering bar: standards, release cadence, on-call, and performance conversations.
• Own the architecture behind the core agent platform and infra decisions.
• Collaborate with the CTO on product roadmap, ML strategy, and hiring loop.

Skills

ML engineering

Delivery ownership

Agent-driven development

People management

Remote/time-zone leadership

Ambiguity tolerance

Job description

About Sylvan

Sylvan is building autonomous revenue teams.

We help B2B companies grow and protect revenue from their existing customers by identifying revenue-driving signals and deploying agents that act on them at the exact moment, across every account. We work with customers ranging from fast-growth startups to Fortune 500 enterprises like ServiceNow. Our ambition is to power the top-line of the economy.

We are guided by a core principle: no assholes, high mutual respect. We operate at high intensity, but with deep respect. Direct, honest, and no egos — just a shared obsession to win.

We’ve raised $11M from world-class investors and strategics including TQ Ventures and HubSpot Ventures. We are a fully in-office company based in New York City.

We will only hire A-players and are highly willing to go above-market in ownership, equity, and cash compensation. We want world-class builders who are excited by the opportunity to be part of a category-defining company at the earliest stage. It won’t be easy. We’re going to move fast. But, it’ll be fun.

What you'll do

• Lead the design and delivery of production-grade revenue agents. We believe the best engineering leaders stay close to the work. You operate as an IC for your first 3-6 months, then evolve into managing and growing the team while continuing to ship yourself.

• Set the engineering bar for a team where agents write most of the code. Review standards, definition of done, release cadence, on-call, incident response, sprint scope and sequencing. You inherit two strong engineers and hire everyone who comes after, which includes performance management and the conversations nobody wants to have.

• Own the architecture behind our core agent platform. The ontology and semantic layer that reconciles every customer's warehouse into one representation, the signal pipeline that sits on top of it, and the transformer work ahead of us. You make the build-versus-buy calls and the infra cost decisions.

• Share technical direction with our CTO and shape the platform. Product roadmap and sequencing, ML approach, model strategy, hiring loop design, closing candidates. Your team's work across deployments decides which patterns generalize into the world model and which are artifacts of a single warehouse. Shangyan holds final say on ML direction and product, and we are hiring someone who will disagree with him and be right often enough to matter.

What you'll bring

• Deep, current ML across both eras: feature engineering, uplift and causal methods, time series, and calibration alongside transformers, world models, and agent architectures

• End- to-end delivery ownership somewhere nobody above you was catching failures, where you built the scaffolding rather than inheriting it working

• Fluency in agent-driven development as a practice, having changed how your team reviews, tests, and specs work because of it

• Willingness to inherit a five-year-old codebase you did not write and improve it incrementally

• Experience managing people you did not hire, ideally remotely and across time zones

• High tolerance for ambiguity and unglamorous work

Your background could be

• Technical co-founder of a company that failed or had a small exit

• Ran engineering at a company between roughly 5 and 40 engineers, or were the technical lead who took a team through that growth

• Staff or principal IC who led a pod and wants the larger scope

• Early engineer who grew into the engineering lead role at one company

• Managed engineers in another time zone while based somewhere else — a hub plus a remote pod, rather than fully distributed

Even better…

• Have 1+ years of engineering management experience

• Have 3+ years of industry experience in software engineering

• Data-intensive B2B product background: warehouse-native, per-tenant, enterprise data access

• Strong product judgment

• Strong communication skills and ability to work directly with enterprise customers

Compensation

$250K – $400K + Equity

This range reflects the expected compensation for this role. Compensation within the range is determined based on experience, skills, and the scope of responsibilities, with flexibility for candidates who demonstrate exceptional impact.

In addition to base salary, we offer competitive equity. Final compensation may vary based on location within the United States.

Benefits

We proudly offer the following benefits for our full-time employees (with more to come):

• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family

• Parental Leave

• Monthly stipend to support your wellness, lifestyle, and work-life balance

• Daily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best

• Take what you need vacation policy

These benefits are further detailed in Sylvan's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sylvan's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.