Senior Engineering Manager, Guardian

Semgrep; California; On-site; USD 230,000 - 288,000; Full time

Job summary

Semgrep seeks a Senior Engineering Manager for the Guardian platform to embed security into software at the moment it's written. You will lead the platform team, owning surfaces from agent-harness to MCP server and IDE extensions, focusing on adoption and trust across Semgrep's products and partner ecosystems.

You will work with product and design to roadmap the platform, mentor engineers, and foster a culture of transparency and high-quality delivery.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience leading software engineering teams.
• Strong foundation in product development and production readiness with multi-disciplinary teams.
• Familiarity with agile development principles and iterative milestones.
• Desire to coach and mentor engineers and leaders.
• Experience building durable platform APIs/SDKs or security products.

Responsibilities

• Create a roadmap for the platform with product and design partners.
• Prioritize and direct the team's schedule and tech quality.
• Coach and mentor engineers with feedback and performance reviews.
• Build an environment of trust that rewards creativity and responsibility.
• Grow the team by hiring diverse, high-level talent.

Skills

People leadership

Software engineering leadership

Product development

Agile development

Coaching & mentorship

Job description

About Semgrep

Semgrep, the leader in code security for builders, empowers invention without friction. Teams catch, flag, and fix real issues before they ship, powered by security that learns as they build. Semgrep secures code as it's written and provides guardrails that pave the road for developers to move fast and stay secure. Built for builders and trusted by security, Semgrep lives where developers work, delivering fixes without breaking flow, and giving security teams visibility, control, and confidence. Semgrep gets smarter as you build, with AI that learns your context to cut false positives and prioritize reachable vulnerabilities, validated by 95% of security reviewers across 6M+ findings. Semgrep makes zero false positives a reality with AppSec teams triaging 80% fewer false positives across Code and Supply Chain, dramatically shrinking the backlog.

Founded in San Francisco and backed by Menlo Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, Semgrep is recognized by Gartner in Application Security Testing and is trusted by leading organizations, including Vanta, Lyft, and Dropbox. Learn more at semgrep.dev.

About the role

As a Senior Engineering Manager for Semgrep Guardian, you'll lead the platform team making security a native property of software at the moment it's written - not a gate applied afterward. Code is increasingly authored inside AI agents, the MCP layer, and the IDE, and Guardian is the platform layer that embeds Semgrep's deterministic security analysis directly into that loop. Semgrep's detection teams own best-in-class SAST, secrets, SCA, and malware engines; Guardian owns the integration, orchestration, and distribution that turn them into a single, low-latency risk verdict an agent or developer can act on in the moment.
Your team owns the surfaces where that verdict is produced and consumed - agent-harness hooks and the partner SDK, the security MCP server, IDE and editor extensions, the orchestration and policy layer, and the unified risk API. Success is measured not by findings produced, but by adoption of that verdict across Semgrep's products, our partners' agents and IDEs, and the trust developers place in it. Through Semgrep's culture of transparency, you'll see and influence the decisions that make a startup successful.

You will:

• Work closely with your product and design partners to create a roadmap for the success of your platform that balances iterative changes with big bets

• Prioritize and direct your team's schedule, balancing the needs of developing new technology, serving internal and external consumers, and maintaining internal technical quality

• Retain and strengthen engineers with coaching and mentorship, regular feedback, performance reviews, and performance management when necessary

• Build an environment of trust that rewards creativity, risk taking, and personal responsibility

• Continually grow your team through the hiring of diverse, productive, high-level technical talent

You are ideal for this role if you have:

• 3+ years of experience leading software engineering teams

• A strong foundation in product development and bringing products to production via a multi-disciplinary engineering team - including understanding best practices for design, iterative milestone creation, and utilizing customer feedback

• Familiarity with agile development principles and iterative milestone development

• A strong desire to help engineers and other leaders grow through coaching and mentorship

• You have opinions on building durable platforms, APIs, or SDKs for demanding consumers; have worked on developer tooling, IDE/editor extensions, or AI agent, MCP, and protocol integrations; or have built a security product before

Compensation

The estimated starting annual salary range for this position is $230,000 to $288,000 USD. The actual base salary will be determined based on a number of factors, which may include job-related skills, relevant experience, qualifications, location, internal equity, and market data. In addition to base salary, total compensation may include equity, variable compensation, and benefits. We view equity as a meaningful part of our compensation philosophy and a way for employees to share in the long-term value they help create.

Compensation ranges are reviewed regularly and may be adjusted as the role, individual performance, or market conditions evolve.

What we offer (FTE only)