Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

Description

The Chat team sits in the Agents and Context group and builds the conversational, agentic layer 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.

The team ships production software that other company solutions depend on.

You will lead 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, and you will manage the engineers directly and act as the team's primary project manager.

The company hires wherever the best engineers are, so the team spans continents and leading it remotely is central to the role.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery of the Chat roadmap by splitting it into milestones, spotting risks early, and keeping shipping predictable.
• Run hiring for the team from start to finish, including job descriptions, interview loops, sourcing with Recruiting, and onboarding.
• Coach and develop 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 to shape the roadmap and priorities, and with data science, UX and other Agents and Context teams on shared foundations and quality signals.
• Improve team process for planning, async communication, releases and on-call by building consensus and writing clearly, not by mandate.
• Represent the team to leadership and stakeholders.

Requirements

• A record of managing software engineering teams as an established engineering manager, including 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.
• Past hands-on experience as a senior software 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.
• Nice to have: experience with Elasticsearch, Kibana, search and information retrieval, or open source communities.
• Product sense: you are comfortable with ambiguity, can set and communicate priorities, and care about what makes an agentic product useful to users.
• Strong written and spoken communication. Clear, concise long-form writing is central to how this team works.
• Direct, kind, calm and empathetic. You hold people accountable and handle difficult conversations without drama.

Conditions

The company is distributed by design, and the role spans time zones across continents.

Export controls may require a license for candidates located in or nationals of Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the listed Ukrainian territories, though nationality does not affect eligibility.

Benefits

• Pay is set by the work you do, not your previous salary.
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
• Flexible locations and schedules for many roles, so you can shape your own calendar.
• A generous number of vacation days each year.
• The company matches up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) in financial donations and volunteer service.
• Up to 40 hours each year for volunteer projects you choose.
• At least 16 weeks of parental leave.
• Benefits are designed to be equivalent across regions, adjusted for local regulations.