Sr. Engineering Manager

Additive; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation covered

Job summary

Additive, based in San Francisco, is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to be a hands-on player-coach for one of Additive’s engineering teams. You will directly manage a team of 4-6 that will grow to 10-12 engineers, while remaining an active technical contributor.

Relocation costs to the San Francisco area can be covered. Our engineers own outcomes end to end, from understanding a tax professional’s workflow to rollout and measurable customer impact.

Qualifications

• Written meaningful production software and ability to review designs, PRs, and debug difficult issues.
• Directly managed experienced engineers while contributing technically.
• Shipped customer-facing, eval-driven products and connected engineering decisions to outcomes.
• Strong product and customer judgment linking decisions to adoption and revenue or operations.
• Experience operating with startup urgency and navigating enterprise governance.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship: contribute to design, implementation, debugging, testing, and release; stay fluent in the codebase; guide AI-driven development; choose pragmatic options that ship value fast.
• Develop exceptional engineers: set expectations, give feedback, coach growth, address issues, and help engineers move into leadership roles.
• Make evals part of product development: refine what we measure and how signals drive decisions, tests, and datasets.
• Turn strategy into owned outcomes: define finish lines, milestones, and lightweight operating rhythms; forecast and surface risks.
• Stay close to customers and the product: spend time with tax professionals and customer teams to make sound product calls when PM is absent.
• Grow a high-talent-density team: own hiring, assessment, onboarding, and calibration to attract top ICs.

Skills

Hands-on leadership

Staff/Principal mentoring

People management

Technical leadership

Recruiting

Job description

About Additive

Additive builds AI-powered tools that give tax professionals superpowers. Tax and accounting is a $600B+ market with a severe talent shortage and too many manual, repetitive workflows. Our systems turn dense, often unstructured tax documents into trustworthy structured data and AI-native preparation and review experiences.

The performance of the product we put in the hands of accountants is the most important metric for our team. Outputs must be trustworthy under filing-season deadlines. The cost of being wrong is high: a plausible but incorrect extraction can waste hours of professional review, misstate a tax position, or flow into a filed return. We use extensive in-house datasets, rigorous evaluation suites, and deep, collaborative customer partnerships to decide what is ready to ship and where to invest next.

As part of Thomson Reuters, we pair startup speed and individual ownership with deep tax expertise, established customer relationships, and a path to rapidly deploy into real tax workflows at scale. In this environment, our team can build quickly, learn directly from customers, and distribute what works. Today, Additive products are used daily at scale by many of the biggest accounting firms in the country.

The Opportunity

We are hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to be a hands-on player-coach for one of Additive’s engineering teams. You will directly manage a team of 4-6 that will grow up to 10-12 engineers, primarily at the staff and principal level, while remaining an active technical contributor. You will be especially close to the code during your first three to six months as you build context and credibility.

Our engineers own outcomes end to end, from understanding a tax professional’s workflow to rollout and measurable customer impact. Your role is to raise the technical and product bar, develop exceptional engineers and future leaders, and help the team move quickly without becoming its decision-making hub. We measure leadership contribution by team output, customer impact, and talent density, not headcount or hierarchy.

Role Snapshot

• Level: Senior Engineering Manager; hands-on player-coach

• Reports to: Aaron Taylor

• Technical surface: Document ingestion and extraction, tax-data systems, AI-native preparation and review, evaluation infrastructure, and platform reliability

• Location: Downtown San Francisco, five days per week

We build through tight collaboration among engineering, product, tax experts, and customers. Working together in person helps us make faster decisions, pair on difficult problems, coach in the moment, and maintain shared context. Additive can cover relocation costs for moving to the San Francisco area.

What You Will Own

• Build and ship. Contribute directly to technical design, implementation, debugging, testing, and release work. Stay fluent in the codebase and step into the highest-leverage technical problems without becoming the team’s bottleneck. Guide effective AI-driven development throughout all aspects of the development lifecycle. Choose the pragmatic, boring option when that ships reliable value to customers faster.

• Develop exceptional engineers. Set clear expectations, give direct and personal feedback, coach technical and product judgment, address performance or interpersonal issues early, and help engineers grow into larger leadership roles.

• Make evals part of product development. Establish and refine what we measure, why it matters, and how evaluation signals become release decisions, product priorities, and durable regression guardrails. Turn production failures and customer feedback into representative test cases, datasets, and metrics.

• Turn strategy into owned outcomes. Define clear finish lines, ownership, milestones, and lightweight operating rhythms. Improve forecasting, surface risk early, and preserve flexibility in how engineers solve problems.

• Stay close to customers and the product. Spend time with tax professionals and customer-facing teams, understand their workflows, and make sound product calls when there is no product manager in the room.

• Grow a high-talent-density team. Own hiring, candidate assessment, closing, onboarding, and interviewer calibration. Create an environment where exceptional individual contributors want to work and where adding people follows impact, not empire building.

What We Are Looking For

You have:

• Written meaningful production software within recent years and can still review a design, read a pull request, debug a difficult issue, and hold your own in a technical debate with a senior engineer.

• Directly managed experienced engineers while continuing to contribute technically, with a track record of improving both individual growth and team output.

• Shipped customer-facing, eval-driven products and connected engineering decisions to adoption, trust, revenue, or operational outcomes.

• Strong product and customer judgment, including experience connecting engineering decisions to adoption, trust, revenue, or operational outcomes.

• Experience in both operating with startup urgency as well as navigating the stakeholders, governance, security, and dependencies of a larger enterprise.

Helpful, not required: Experience with Python, TypeScript, cloud infrastructure, agentic or retrieval-based systems, document AI, tax technology, or enterprise data products.

Core Values

• Championship-winning mindset: We’re here to build something incredible - and we do what it takes to achieve this. Outstanding performance is the expectation.

• Team First: We’re low-ego. Our pride comes from the team and mission succeeding.

• Tenacious: We’re willing to do hard, unglamorous tasks and stick through tough times.

• Accountant Obsessed: Additive exists to 10x accountants. We all interact directly with accountants on a regular basis to understand and improve their world.

• Genuine Fun: We’re having fun. It’s a grand adventure together, and we’re going to surmount never before seen challenges with wonderful teammates.

At Additive we value diversity and are committed to an inclusive workplace. Additive is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic under federal, state, or local law. If you require an accommodation during the job application process, please notify [e-mail] for support.