Sr. Software Engineering Manager

zenbusiness; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

ZenBusiness is seeking a Sr. Engineering Manager to lead a team of engineers and the AI agents they work with, shipping products that help small business owners start, run, and grow their businesses. You will partner with product, design, and marketing to decide what to build, then own delivery from idea to production and ongoing maintenance.

We move fast, ship often, and hold a high bar. This is a hands-on role.

Qualifications

• 3+ years leading and growing high-performing engineering teams that ship web-based products.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience with modern web stack.
• Hands-on fluency with agentic engineering workflows and tools.
• Proven impact of AI/automation on delivery speed or quality.

Responsibilities

• Own outcomes, not output. You answer for whether your team's work moves the business metrics it's tied to.
• Run your area like an owner. Set the roadmap with your PM and step into the product role when needed.
• Build a high-agency team. Hire engineers, provide feedback, and keep a remote team connected.
• Grow the next layer of leaders. Develop senior engineers and junior managers into leaders.
• Lead from the front technically. Review designs and code, ship code when it unblocks the team.
• Raise quality and speed together. Ship tested, observable code with guardrails for AI tooling.
• Decide with data. Run experiments, measure AI features, and stop non-payoff work.
• Shape engineering beyond your team. Contribute to architecture and AI practices across ZenBusiness

Skills

Engineering leadership

Scale web products

AI/agentic workflows

Roadmap ownership

Mentoring

Data-driven decisions

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

Who We Are

We started our company to help others launch and run their own businesses, at any stage. The way we help is by keeping it simple and supporting entrepreneurs one step at a time. Put simply: our mission is to enable anyone to start, run, and grow their business while avoiding the common pitfalls that derail hopeful entrepreneurs. No more having to wade through forms, taxes, or ongoing state compliance.

We are a remote company based in Austin, Texas. We have team members from Florida to Oregon and all points in-between. Take pride in your work knowing that it shapes how people all across the country reach their goal of starting, running, and growing their business.

If the idea of helping people and working with a genuinely caring, supportive team excites you, then you've come to the right place.

The Role

ZenBusiness is hiring a Sr. Engineering Manager to lead a team of engineers and the AI agents they work with, to ship products that help small business owners start, run, and grow their businesses. Part of the job is finding where AI makes those products more useful and valuable for customers. You will partner with product, design, and marketing to decide what to build, then own delivery from idea to production to ongoing maintenance. We move fast, ship often, and hold a high bar. This is a hands-on role. You stay close enough to the code to make good design calls, unblock your team, and earn their trust.

This position will report to the Vice President of Engineering, and this is a remote role.

How We Work With AI

You use AI tools and coding agents in your own work every day: writing and reviewing code, drafting specs, and analyzing data

You run your management work with agents too: standup synthesis, 1:1 prep, planning, goal tracking, and performance reviews

You set the standard for how your team works with agents, and you raise the team's AI fluency through coaching, pairing, and shared practices

You find repetitive or error-prone work in your team's delivery process (testing, triage, releases, documentation) and hand it to agents and automation, with guardrails that keep quality high

You track your team's AI adoption, impact, and spend, and make sure the tooling pays for itself

Responsibilities

• Own outcomes, not output. You answer for whether your team's work moves the business metrics it's tied to, not just velocity or team health
• Run your area like an owner. Set the roadmap with your PM, say no to work that won't move the numbers, and step into the product role when there's no PM in the room
• Build a high-agency team. Hire engineers who raise the bar, give direct and frequent feedback, act quickly on performance issues, and keep a remote team connected and accountable
• Grow the next layer of leaders. Develop senior engineers and junior managers into people who can run larger scope without you
• Lead from the front technically. Review designs and code, ship code when it unblocks the team, and run incident reviews that fix root causes
• Raise quality and speed together. Ship tested, observable code that releases safely and predictably, with agents and automation carrying more of the load
• Decide with data. Run experiments in LaunchDarkly, measure AI features with evals and customer feedback, read the results honestly, and stop work that isn't paying off
• Shape engineering beyond your team. Build reusable patterns for working with agents that other teams adopt, and contribute to architecture, platform, and AI practices across ZenBusiness

Qualifications

• 3+ years leading and growing high-performing engineering teams that ship web-based products, including experience managing other managers
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with recent hands-on time in a modern web stack
• Daily, hands-on fluency with agentic engineering workflows and tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex, and a clear point of view on how they change the way teams build software
• Proof you've used AI and automation to measurably improve a team's delivery speed or quality
• A record of tying your team's work to business results, with the metrics to show it
• A record of building teams people want to work on again, including engineers you've grown into leaders
• Clear, concise writing. You can make a decision, explain it on one page, and defend it

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience shipping LLM-powered products, agents, or evaluation frameworks
• Experience building internal tooling that helps engineers and agents work together
• Experience at a high-gr