Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

Description

The company makes search, security and observability products, and more than 50% of the Fortune 500 use its AI search platform.

The Chat team sits within the Agents and Context group and builds the conversational, agentic platform that lets customers talk to and act on their own data in Elasticsearch.

The team owns the chat experience, the agent harness and tools, retrieval and citations, streaming, memory, and the evaluation layer that keeps answers grounded and reliable. Other company solutions build on what it ships, and all of it is production software.

This is a senior people and delivery role leading a distributed team of about 12 engineers. Each engineering team is run by a Product Manager, a Technical Lead and an Engineering Manager working together. You manage the engineers directly, act as the team's main project manager, and work with the PM and Tech Lead to set and deliver the roadmap. The space moves fast, so you should be comfortable adding structure where little exists and staying calm and direct as priorities shift.

The company hires distributed by design, wherever the best people are, so the team spans several continents. Leading a distributed team well is essential to the role.

Responsibilities

• Own the Chat roadmap: split it into milestones, anticipate risks early, and keep delivery predictable.
• Run hiring from start to finish: write job descriptions, run interview loops, source candidates with Recruiting, and onboard new hires.
• Coach engineers at every level through regular 1:1s, clear expectations and candid feedback.
• Manage performance consistently, covering promotions, development plans, and underperformance through to resolution.
• Work with the Tech Lead and PM on roadmap and priorities, and with data science, UX and the other Agents and Context teams on shared primitives and quality signals.
• Improve team practice in planning, async communication, and release and on-call work, building consensus through clear writing rather than mandates.
• Represent the team to leadership and stakeholders.

Requirements

• Have a track record as an established engineering manager of software teams, including hiring, coaching, promotions and performance management.
• Have delivered large software initiatives across multiple teams in a distributed, async-first setting, including setting up or improving team processes.
• Have worked as a senior hands-on engineer, with enough depth to follow a TypeScript, Node and React stack, an Elasticsearch-backed system, and how LLM products are built and evaluated. You will not write production code, but you must spot bottlenecks, risks and decisions that are hard to reverse.
• Ideally have familiarity with LLM applications, including RAG, agents and tool use, evaluation, and prompt and context engineering.
• Experience with Elasticsearch, Kibana, search and information retrieval, or open source communities is a plus.
• Show product sense: work well amid ambiguity, set and communicate priorities, and care about what makes an agentic product good for users.
• Write and speak clearly; concise long-form writing is central to how this team works.
• Be direct, kind, calm and empathetic. Hold people accountable and handle hard conversations without drama.

Conditions

Pay is base salary only, with no variable compensation component.

The typical starting salary range is €73.300 - €115.900 EUR.

The final offer within the range depends on relevant experience, skills and expertise, fit with the role requirements, and the scope and complexity of the position.

Pay ranges are based on external market benchmarks, internal pay equity and the responsibilities of each role.

Export controls apply to people located in or nationals of Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories Russia has annexed (Crimea, DNR, LNR, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia). An export license may be required as a condition of employment, but nationality itself does not affect eligibility.

The company welcomes people with disabilities, and applicants keep their rights under federal employment law.

Benefits

• Pay based on the work you do here, not your previous salary.
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
• Flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
• A generous number of vacation days each year.
• A match of up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and volunteer service.
• Up to 40 hours each year for volunteer projects you choose.
• At least 16 weeks of parental leave.
• Benefits aim for parity across regions, though local regulations differ.