Engineering Manager, Core Product Engineering

BackOps AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

Health coverage

401(k)

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Flexible time off

Meals in office

Job summary

BackOps AI is building the core product for reusable workflow automations in supply-chain operations. We seek an engineering leader to guide a team of product engineers, shaping both product and architecture in close collaboration with Product and Design.

You will stay close to the work—reading code, joining design reviews, and maintaining a high bar on how software is built. You’ll drive reliability, iteration, and real customer impact.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of engineering management experience.
• Strong fundamentals in system design, code quality, testing, and release practices.
• Proven track record shipping quality software with high standards.
• Strong product and design instincts with own opinions.
• Experience building with LLMs or AI agents in production.
• AI-first approach using coding agents in workflow.
• Comfort with evolving requirements and uncertain answers.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.

Responsibilities

• Hire, lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of product engineers.
• Own the evolution of BackOps core product, and its end-to-end surface.
• Own the SDLC end to end: architecture, design, code review, testing, release, and production afterward.
• Drive predictable delivery and raise the engineering quality bar. Be accountable for what ships, when it ships, and how well it holds up.
• Partner with Product and Design in a fast loop. Bring your own product opinions, decide quickly, ship, and measure.
• Work directly with customers and design partners. Their operations change constantly, and the product has to change with them.
• Drive how we plan, evaluate, and improve our AI agents, and build the team's fluency in doing it.
• Champion reliability, safety, and performance of the systems running in live customer environments.

Skills

Team leadership

Software engineering

LLMs / AI agents

Product thinking

Design reviews

Code quality

Communication

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Copilot

Codex

Job description

BackOps AI transforms supply-chain operations with agentic AI that automates complex workflows, freeing teams to focus on what matters most. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, we foster a culture of innovation, ownership, and measurable impact.

The Role

Core Product Engineering sits at the core of BackOps, building the product that turns complex supply-chain operations into reusable workflow automations. We are seeking an engineering leader to guide a team of product engineers building the systems our customers run their operations on.

This role is for leaders who think in products as much as in systems. This product area does not have settled patterns yet, so a large part of this job is product and design thinking done alongside Product and Design, not execution handed down from a roadmap. You should want to be close to the work: read code, sit in design reviews, and hold a high bar on how the software gets built.

Your Impact

In this role, you will own the evolution of BackOps core product, making sure it meets the next wave of customer scale, quality, and reliability needs. You will partner with product, design, and customers to deliver software that ships predictably and holds up in production.

• Hire, Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of product engineers.
• Own the evolution of BackOps core product: the reusable workflow automations customers run their operations on, and the product surface end to end.
• Own the software development lifecycle end to end: architecture and design, code review, testing, release, and what happens in production afterward.
• Drive predictable delivery and raise the engineering quality bar. Be accountable for what ships, when it ships, and how well it holds up.
• Partner with Product and Design in a tight, fast loop. Bring your own product opinions, decide quickly, ship, and measure.
• Work directly with customers and design partners. Their operations change constantly, and the product has to change with them.
• Drive how we plan, evaluate, and improve our AI agents, and build the team's fluency in doing it.
• Champion reliability, safety, and performance of the systems running in live customer environments.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years managing engineers, on top of a strong hands-on engineering background.
• Deep grounding in software engineering fundamentals: system design, code quality, testing, and release practice. You can go deep with your engineers on a design decision.
• A track record of shipping quality software predictably, and of raising the engineering standard of a team.
• Strong product and design instincts. You can hold your own in a design review and you bring your own opinions about what the product should do.
• Experience building with LLMs or AI agents in production, and a clear view on how to tell whether they are working.
• A genuine AI-first approach to engineering. You use coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex) in your own workflow and you can teach it.
• Comfortable when requirements evolves and the right answer is not known yet.
• Clear written and verbal communication with engineers, designers, customers, and founders.

Nice to Have

• Depth in evals, agent orchestration, multi-agent architectures, or RAG in production.
• Zero-to-one experience: built a product from an idea to product-market fit.
• Built with design partners, where the customer is in the loop weekly.
• Grown a team through a step change in size, and hired well while doing it.
• Exposure to operationally complex industries (logistics, supply chain, manufacturing, retail).

What Success Looks Like

• Every cross-team initiative has an owner, a definition of done, and a status you can trust.
• Intake has a front door, and unplanned work is measured weekly rather than estimated once a year.
• The org plans and re-plans without it being an event.
• Escalation paths are designed, written down, and used in a real incident.
• Systemic problems get fixed once rather than escalated repeatedly.
• Leadership makes decisions on current information without anyone assembling it by hand.

Why BackOps

• Own the core product of an AI-native company at the point where it is still being defined.
• See your work land in real supply-chain operations and show up in a customer's week.
• Small team with real autonomy and direct access to founders and customers.
• Backed by exceptional investors and advisors.

Rewards

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401(k) plan, disability insurance, and life insurance.
• Flexible time off.
• Daily meals in the office, and regular team events and offsites.