Engineering Manager - Workers Runtime, Edge Team

United States Digital Space LLC; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC in Austin (Hybrid) is hiring an Engineering Manager for the Workers Runtime - Edge team. You will lead a high-performance, security-focused group managing a critical edge runtime across our fleet and guide architectural evolution to scale today and tomorrow.

You will evaluate C++/Rust proposals, balance feature work with foundational improvements, and mentor engineers to sustain a healthy, productive culture in a demanding, distributed environment.

Qualifications

• Experience leading a team for large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong architecture evaluation and tradeoffs in C++/Rust.
• 4+ years of professional C++ or Rust experience.
• Security-focused development and high performance.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Workers Runtime - Edge team and own reliability.
• Drive infrastructure initiatives — migrating legacy systems and redesigning core abstractions.
• Own reliability and release safety for a service handling tens of millions of requests per second.
• Make hard prioritisation calls between new feature work and foundational investments.
• Partner with adjacent teams across the Developer Platform to support the broader roadmap.
• Grow and develop the team by hiring, mentoring and setting clear expectations.

Skills

Team leadership

Low-latency systems

C++ or Rust

APIs for developers

Linux systems

Tools

WebAssembly

Job description

About Us

At the company, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. the company protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by the company all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. the company was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

At the company, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.

Available Locations: Austin (Hybrid)

About the Department

Emerging Technologies & Incubation (ETI) is where new and bold products are built and released within the company. Rather than being constrained by the structures which make the company a massively successful business, we are able to leverage them to deliver entirely new tools and products to our customers. the company’s edge and network make it possible to solve problems at massive scale and efficiency which would be impossible for almost any other organization.

About the Team

The Workers Runtime team delivers features and improvements to our Runtime which actually executes customer code at the edge. We care deeply about increasing performance, improving JS API surface area and compiled language support through WebAssembly, and optimizing to meet the next 10x increase in scale. The Runtime is a hostile environment - System resources such as memory, cpu, I/O, etc need to be managed extremely carefully and security must be foundational in everything we do.
Our work is deeply systems-oriented. We build and maintain the C++ and Rust codebase that embeds the JavaScript engine, manages isolate lifecycles, enforces resource limits (CPU, memory, I/O), and orchestrates how customer scripts are loaded, cached, and executed. We operate in a hostile multi-tenant environment where security must be foundational — from side-channel attack mitigations to isolate sandboxing — and performance is measured in microseconds.

What you'll do

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Workers Runtime - Edge team. You will own the team that keeps our runtime service running in production across the company's entire fleet and drives the architectural evolution of the platform.
You will:

• Lead a team of senior systems engineers working in C++ and Rust on one of the most performance-critical and security-sensitive services at the company.
• Drive major infrastructure initiatives — migrating legacy systems, redesigning core abstractions, and laying the groundwork for next-generation runtime architecture that will define the platform for years to come.
• Own reliability and release safety for a service handling tens of millions of requests per second. You will improve release processes, invest in health monitoring and automated rollback, and ensure the team can ship changes confidently at scale.
• Make hard prioritisation calls between new feature work that unblocks customers and the ongoing investment in foundations, security, and developer velocity that the team needs to stay healthy long-term.
• Partner closely with adjacent teams across the Developer Platform to ensure the runtime supports the broader product roadmap — including compute, storage, networking, and observability teams.
• Grow and develop the team Hire strong systems engineers, set clear expectations, provide technical mentorship, and create an environment where people do their best work.

You bring a track record of leading teams that operate large-scale, low-latency distributed systems. You understand how to balance the urgency of production with the patience required for foundational improvement. You are technically credible enough to evaluate architectural proposals, weigh tradeoffs in C++/Rust systems, and earn the respect of a deeply technical team — while being a strong enough manager to build a healthy, high-performing engineering culture.

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience

• Experience leading a team
• Comfortable leading and hiring a team that builds low level distributed systems.
• Excel at planning, creating teams and overseeing execution to meet commitments and deliver with predictability
• Comfortable building developer-loved APIs that scale
• Demonstrate a track record of leading a team including hiring, on-boarding, and professional development. You inspire your team to reach higher. You’re as good as explaining “why” as you are “how”
• Experience implementing tools, process, internal instrumentation, methodologies and resolving blockages
• At least 4 years of recent professional experience with C++ or Rust.
• Solid understanding of computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented or functional design.
• Deep understanding of the web and technologies such as web browsers, HTTP, JavaScript and WebAssembly
• Strong understanding of Linux systems programming, process models, and networking.

Bonus Points

• Experience building high performance distributed systems.
• Experience working with cloud platforms, especially server-less platforms.
• Experience with the internals of JS engines such as V8, SpiderMonkey, or JavaScriptCore
• Experience with standalone WebAssembly runtimes such as Wasmtime, Wasmer, Lucet, etc
• Deep Linux/UNIX systems, kernel, or networking knowledge
• Contributions to large open source projects
• Experience working in low-latency real time environments such as game streaming, game engine architecture, high frequency trading, payment systems.
• Experience debugging, optimizing and identifying failure modes ina large-scale Linux-based distributed system.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cl