Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

Description

The company makes search AI software that lets people find answers in real time across all their data at scale.

The Chat team sits in the Agents and Context group. It builds the conversational and agentic platform that lets customers chat with and act on their own data in Elasticsearch. The team owns the conversation 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 the team ships.

The team is led by a trio of Product Manager, Technical Lead and Engineering Manager. You will lead about 12 engineers, manage them directly, act as the team's main project manager, and work with the PM and Tech Lead on the roadmap and its delivery. The role is mainly people and delivery leadership in a fast-changing area, so you should be comfortable creating structure where little exists and staying calm and direct as priorities move.

The company hires distributed by design, wherever and whoever the strongest engineers are. The team spans continents, so leading a distributed group well is essential.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery of the Chat roadmap by splitting it into milestones, spotting risks early, and keeping releases predictable.
• Run hiring for the team from start to finish: job descriptions, interview loops, sourcing with Recruiting, and onboarding.
• Coach and grow engineers at every level through regular 1:1s, clear expectations and candid feedback.
• Handle performance 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 primitives and quality signals.
• Improve team practice (planning, async communication, release and on-call) by building consensus and writing clearly, not by mandate.
• Represent the team to leadership and other stakeholders.

Requirements

• A proven record as an established engineering manager of software teams, covering hiring, coaching, promotions and performance management.
• A record of delivering large, multi-team software work in a distributed, async-first setting, including creating or improving team processes.
• Earlier hands-on experience as a senior 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, familiarity with LLM applications, including RAG, agents and tool use, evaluation, and prompt and context engineering.
• Plus: experience with Elasticsearch, Kibana, search and information retrieval, or open source communities.
• 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 spoken communication. Clear, concise long-form writing is central to how the team works.
• Direct, kind, calm and empathetic. You hold people to account and handle hard conversations without drama.

Conditions

Pay is base salary only, with no variable component.

The typical starting salary range is €80.400 - €127.200 EUR.

The final offer within the range depends on factors such as relevant experience, skill level, fit with the role requirements, and the scope and complexity of the position.

Pay ranges come from external market benchmarks, internal pay equity, and the responsibilities of each role.

Many roles offer flexible locations and schedules.

The company is subject to U.S. and other export controls: people located in or nationals of Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (Crimea, the DNR, the LNR, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia), may need an export license as a condition of employment, though nationality does not affect eligibility for employment.

Benefits

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