Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

Description

The Chat team sits in the Agents and Context group. It builds the conversational and agentic layer that lets customers talk to and act on their own data in Elasticsearch. The team owns the chat experience, the agent framework and its tools, retrieval and citations, streaming, memory, and the evaluation work that keeps answers accurate. Everything it ships is production software that other company products depend on.

This is a senior engineering manager role leading a distributed team of about 12 engineers. Each engineering team here is run by a trio of a Product Manager, a Technical Lead and an Engineering Manager. You will 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 quickly, so the work involves building structure where little exists and staying steady as priorities change.

The company hires wherever the best engineers are, and the team is spread across continents, so leading a distributed team well is essential.

Responsibilities

• Deliver the Chat roadmap by splitting it into milestones, spotting risks early, and keeping the team's shipping predictable.
• Run hiring end to end: 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: handle promotions and development plans, and take underperformance through to resolution.
• Work with the Tech Lead and PM on the roadmap and priorities, and with data science, UX and the other Agents and Context teams on shared building blocks and quality measures.
• Improve team processes for planning, async communication, releases and on-call through agreement and clear writing rather than top-down rules.
• Represent the team to leadership and other stakeholders.

Requirements

• A record as an established engineering manager of software teams, covering hiring, coaching, promotions and performance management.
• A record of delivering large initiatives across several teams in a distributed, async-first setting, including creating or improving team processes.
• Previous hands-on senior engineering experience, 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, 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.
• Product sense: you handle ambiguity well, set and communicate priorities, and care about what makes an agentic product useful to users.
• Strong written and verbal communication. You write clear, concise long-form documents.
• You are direct, kind, calm and empathetic. You hold people accountable and handle difficult conversations without drama.

Conditions

Pay is base salary only. There is no variable compensation for this role.

The typical starting salary range is €104.800 to €165.700 EUR. The final offer within that range depends on relevant experience, skills, fit with the role requirements, and the scope of the position.

The company is distributed, and many roles offer flexible locations and schedules.

Candidates in or nationals of Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, or the listed Russian-annexed Ukrainian regions may need an export license as a condition of employment. Nationality and national origin do not affect eligibility.

Candidates who need an accommodation during recruiting can ask for one and will receive a reply within 24 business hours.

Benefits

• Pay is based on the work you do, not your previous salary.
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
• Generous annual vacation allowance.
• Company matches up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for donations and volunteering.
• Up to 40 hours a year for volunteer projects.
• At least 16 weeks of parental leave.
• Benefits are kept at parity across regions as far as local rules allow.