Member of Technical Staff, Engineering Manager

SkyPilot; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical coverage

Autonomy and ownership

Open-source infra startup environment

Gourmet meals

Job summary

SkyPilot, a leader in AI infrastructure, is hiring its first Engineering Manager to scale an engineering org and partner with the CTO and founders. You will lead distributed systems and AI infra engineers, stay hands-on, and help shape product directions while engaging with our largest customers.

You will recruit, coach, and grow a high-performing team, set culture, drive ownership, and ensure reliability and security as our platform expands to new use cases.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years managing engineers (teams of 10+).
• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems or cloud platforms.
• Hands-on with Kubernetes or Slurm; familiar with GPU workloads.
• Ability to act as product manager for their area and prioritize with incomplete information.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a high-performance engineering team across distributed systems and AI infra.
• Drive technical directions, design reviews, and reliability/ security standards.
• Shape platform product directions with founders and set priorities.
• Translate roadmap into milestones and manage execution; own incident escalation.

Skills

Distributed systems

People management

Cloud platforms

Kubernetes

Slurm

GPU workloads

Product management interface

Tools

Kubernetes

Slurm

Job description

About SkyPilot

SkyPilot accelerates the world's most ambitious AI teams. SkyPilot turns fragmented AI compute across clusters into one optimized, highly available and easy-to-use pool: a single AI supercomputer.

SkyPilot (10k+ GitHub stars, 18M+ downloads) manages the GPU fleets of 100s of companies, from Fortune 500s to top AI-natives like Abridge, Applied Compute, Mistral, Unconventional AI, H Company, and Nubank, with usage growing exponentially. Born in the UC Berkeley lab behind Spark and Databricks, our growing team includes top-tier talent from Databricks, Google, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, and Cornell. To date, SkyPilot has raised over $20M in seed funding from top investors (incl. Lux, Coatue, Amplify) and operators (incl. Ali Ghodsi, Jeff Dean, Guillermo Rauch, Amjad Masad, Clem Delangue, Aaron Levie).

The role

We are hiring our very first Engineering Manager to grow and scale our engineering team. You will report directly to our CTO and work closely with the founders.

We are looking for someone who is hands‑on, hungry for impact, and takes pride in building high‑performing teams. The ideal candidate understands the output of a manager is the sum of the outputs of all of their reports.

You’ll lead the engineering team, stay involved in technical work, and shape product directions alongside the founders: reviewing customer call recordings and notes, aggregating requests across accounts, and deciding what the team builds next. You’ll have direct exposure to our largest customers.

What you'll do

Build and lead a high-performance engineering team

• Recruit, coach, and grow a team of distributed systems and AI infrastructure engineers.
• Set the engineering culture and practices needed as the team scales, driving high performance and ownership.
• Give fast, direct feedback.

Drive technical directions

• Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and architecture decisions.
• Own reliability, security, and operational standards for a control plane that frontier AI teams depend on
• Guide the team as the platform expands into more use cases.

Shape product directions for the platform

• Work with the CTO and the founders to set priorities.
• Review customer call recordings and notes, aggregate feature requests and bugs across customers, and turn them into a prioritized roadmap, weighing retention of existing customers and growth of new accounts.

Deliver

• Translate the roadmap into milestones, sequence work across parallel projects, track execution, and serve as the escalation point for major incidents.

What we are looking for

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years managing engineers (teams of 10+), ideally at a fast-growing infrastructure or developer-tools company.
• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems or cloud platforms in production, and still able to contribute technically.
• Hands‑on with Kubernetes or Slurm, and familiar with GPU workloads. Experience with schedulers, orchestration, or AI infrastructure is a plus.
• Comfortable acting as the product manager for your area: synthesizing customer input, running an intake and triage process, and making prioritization calls with incomplete information.
• Strong product intuition and care for both developer experience and enterprise needs, and able to make and communicate hard tradeoffs.
• Experience as an early engineering leader at a startup, prior PM experience, or building enterprise platforms (multi‑tenancy, RBAC, HA control planes) is a strong plus.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation and equity.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision coverage for you and your dependents.
• The chance to work with some of the best minds in AI infrastructure and distributed systems, with significant autonomy and ownership.
• A front-row seat at the latest open-source infra startup from Berkeley.
• Gourmet lunch & dinner for the team to do their best work.

Location: San Mateo, CA.