Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

Description

The company makes search, security and observability tools on a cloud-based platform, and more than 50% of the Fortune 500 use it to put their data, structured and unstructured, to work with AI.

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 Elasticsearch data.

The team owns the conversation experience, the agent harness and tools, retrieval and citations, streaming, memory, and the evaluation layer that keeps answers grounded. Its code is production software that other company solutions depend on.

You will lead a distributed group 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 help the PM and Tech Lead set and deliver the roadmap.

The space moves fast and has little existing structure, so the role suits someone who likes building it and stays calm and direct as priorities change.

The company hires wherever the best people are, so the team spans several continents. Leading across time zones is essential to the role.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of the Chat roadmap: split it into milestones, spot risks early, and keep delivery predictable.
• Manage hiring from start to finish, including job descriptions, interview loops, sourcing with Recruiting, and onboarding.
• Coach engineers at every level through regular 1:1s, clear expectations and candid feedback.
• Handle performance management consistently: 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 building blocks and quality measures.
• Improve team practice in planning, async communication, releases and on-call, reaching agreement through discussion and clear writing rather than mandates.
• Speak for the team to leadership and other stakeholders.

Requirements

• Proven experience 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 setting up or improving team processes.
• Earlier hands-on experience as a senior engineer, with enough depth in TypeScript, Node and React, an Elasticsearch-backed system, and how LLM products are built and evaluated. You will not write production code, but you must identify bottlenecks, risks and decisions that are hard to reverse.
• Familiarity with LLM applications, ideally 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: comfortable with ambiguity, able to set and communicate priorities, and interested in what makes an agentic product useful to users.
• Strong written and verbal communication. Clear, concise long-form writing is central to how this team works.
• Direct, kind, calm and empathetic, able to hold people accountable and handle difficult conversations without drama.

Conditions

Pay is base salary only. The role has no variable compensation.

The typical starting salary range is 369 400 zł to 584 300 zł PLN.

Pay is set from market benchmarks, internal pay equity, and the responsibilities and complexity of the role. The final offer within the range depends on relevant experience, skills, fit with the role requirements, and the scope of the position.

Export rules apply. Candidates located in or nationals of Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, or the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (Crimea, the DNR, the LNR, Kherson or Zaporizhzhia) may need an export license as a condition of employment. Nationality does not affect eligibility.

Applicants have rights under federal employment laws, including the FMLA and the EPPA.

Benefits

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