Engineering Manager

Altana Technologies, Inc.; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 240,000 - 285,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible Time Off

Paid Parental Leave

Competitive equity grants

Discretionary bonus or variable comp

Job summary

Altana Technologies, Inc. in Brooklyn, NY is seeking an Engineering Manager with hybrid work flexibility. You will build the team, own performance management, and partner with product and design to translate customer pain into shipped, scalable software.

You will stay close to customers, participate in calls, define problems with product, and set quality standards while contributing hands-on code and shaping the architecture. This role emphasizes AI-native initiatives and cost-aware operations.

Qualifications

• Real-world professional experience writing backend or data-driven software in demanding environments.
• Strong hands-on engineering skills with production cloud deployments.
• Experience leading a team with coaching, feedback, and hiring responsibilities.
• Track record staying close to customers and delivering incremental releases from prototype to production.
• Experience running planning and delivery for a team that hits commitments.
• Comfort owning operations, including incidents, on-call, and cost.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and good judgment.

Responsibilities

• Build the team and help each person grow, owning performance management end to end.
• Stay close to customers, join calls, review recordings, and identify top friction points.
• Define the problem with product/design before choosing a solution and push back on misaligned work.
• Contribute code and understand domain architecture and tech debt; set quality standards.
• Build AI-native features, validate them, and integrate recovery as standard blocks.
• Lead planning to produce realistic plans, flag risks early, and deliver cycle after cycle.
• Manage on-call load, incidents, and cost with security collaboration.
• Create a team culture that handles ambiguity and supports sharing ideas.

Skills

Backend development

Data-driven software

Cloud deployment

Team leadership

Customer focus

Planning & delivery

On-call operations

Code quality

Job description

As an Engineering Manager at Altana, that’s the work, and you’ll build and lead the team doing it. You’ll embed with product and design, turn hypotheses about where the real pain is into shipped, adopted products, and own the hiring, growth, and performance of the engineers on your team. Your success is measured the same way the team’s is: by the value it delivers to customers, how quickly and steadily it ships, and how well its systems hold up as output grows.

You Will

• Build the team and help each person grow. Own performance management end to end, and use each engineer’s career goals to shape what they work on.
• Stay close to customers, and bring your team with you. Get on customer calls, review session recordings, and know the top friction points in your area at any moment. Make sure your engineers see customer problems firsthand too.
• Hold the bar on solving the right problem. Partner with product and design to define the problem before choosing a solution, and push back on work that isn’t grounded in customer evidence.
• Keep your hands in the work. Contribute meaningful code, know your domain’s architecture and tech debt, and set the standard for quality. The balance will shift toward management as the team grows.
• Build AI-native, and verify it. Treat LLMs, agents, evals, and retrieval as standard building blocks. Hold a clear standard for how AI-assisted code is checked before it reaches customers.
• Make commitments the team keeps. Run a planning process that produces realistic plans, flag risks early, and deliver cycle after cycle.
• Make the team faster over time. Use shared engineering metrics to find bottlenecks and remove them. Know where the team’s time goes, and pay down operational debt before it slows you down.
• Own what you run. Keep incidents rare and responses fast, share on-call load fairly, treat cost as a design input, and work with our security team to keep your area secure.
• Create a team where people do their best work. Build a culture that handles ambiguity well and makes everyone feel safe sharing ideas.

You Have

• Real-world professional experience writing back end or data-driven software in demanding environments.
• Strong hands-on engineering skills. You’ve deployed production code to cloud environments, and you can still ship work you’re proud of. Demonstrated experience working on large, complex problems.
• Experience leading a team, either as an engineering manager or as a tech lead who has taken on real people responsibilities like coaching, feedback, and hiring.
• A track record of staying close to customers, turning their problems into well-scoped, shipped work, and delivering incremental releases from prototype to production.
• Experience running planning and delivery for a team that consistently hits its commitments.
• Comfort owning operations, including incidents, on-call, and system cost.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, and good judgment about when to handle something yourself and when to escal.

Nice to have, but not required

• Experience building production systems with LLMs, agents, evals, or retrieval.
• Experience using engineering metrics such as DORA or SPACE to improve how a team works.
• Background in trade, supply chain, compliance, or working with government customers.

This role is based in Brooklyn, NY, USA with hybrid work flexibility and candidates must be within commuting distance from our Williamsburg, Brooklyn office

US Salary Range and Benefits

$240,000 – $285,000 USD

The salary range, to the extent specified for this role, is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual based salary for the position. The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors, including, but not limited to, work experience, education and/or training, crit cal skills, and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana’s total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally, Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

• Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time O (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time o so you can maximize your work-life balance.
• Parental Leave: We oer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.

At Altana, we believe that a diverse workforce enables greater creativity, performance, and adaptability. We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome you to join us as you are. Our employment opportunities and decisions are based on business needs and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by the laws or regulations in the areas in which we operate. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, in any situation.