Software Engineering Manager, SDK

Description

At Sanity.io , we're building the future of AI-powered Content Operations. Our AI Content Operating System gives teams the freedom to model, create, and automate content the way their business works, accelerating digital development and supercharging content operations efficiency. Companies like SKIMS , Figma , Riot Games , Anthropic , COMPLEX , Nordstrom , and Morningbrew are using Sanity to power and automate their content operations.

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and grow the SDK team — the team responsible primarily for building and maintaining the App SDK project , our framework of typed React hooks that lets developers build focused, real-time content applications on top of Sanity.

Read more about it here: https://www.sanity.io/app-sdk

The App SDK is how developers extend Sanity beyond the Studio. Your team owns the primitives (useDocuments, useDocument, useEditDocument) along with the tooling underneath them (Groq.js, Typegen, our CLI, and HTTP client), and seamless authentication, permissions, and real-time sync. It's an open-source, MIT-licensed project, so the vast majority of your team's work happens in public.

About the role

Leading an engineering team at Sanity means owning strategy, roadmap, and execution alongside your product and design partners. You'll do that by working with excellent people and creating an environment where they can do the best work of their careers.

This is a player-coach role. You'll spend most of your time on people, priorities, and delivery — but you'll stay close enough to the code to review PRs, unblock hard problems, and guide API design.

You'll also join a growing group of engineering managers shaping the culture of our Engineering organization, working closely with Product Designers, Product Managers, Principal Engineers, and technical leaders across the company.

What you would do

Lead and grow a team of engineers — help them prioritize for impact, grow in their careers, and do the best work of their lives.

Own strategy, roadmap, and execution — work closely with your product and design partners to decide what to build, and make sure it ships.

Set technical direction — guide architecture decisions that balance velocity with maintainability across a large-scale TypeScript codebase, and know when to trade completeness for getting value to developers sooner.

Design APIs developers actually enjoy — plan and ship beautiful, minimal APIs that let internal and external developers solve high-level problems and leave the hard implementation details to us.

Stay hands-on — contribute through technical reviews, pairing, and code where it helps the team most.

Build in the open — run an open-source project well: triage, contribution paths, changelogs, and a community that trusts your releases.

Champion developer experience — automatic type generation, hot reload, one-command deploy. Your team is judged on how fast a developer gets from idea to deployed app.

Measure adoption — SDK adoption, apps deployed, time-to-first-app. You'll know what's working because you're measuring it.

Collaborate across the company — align with engineering leadership, product, design, DevRel, and partnerships on shared goals.

Requirements

• Based in San Francisco/Bay Area or remote in the United States.
• 3+ years of engineering leadership experience, including 5+ years as a software engineer.
• Deep experience with TypeScript and React — state management, hooks, module systems and bundling, and core browser concepts. Experience with Go, Vite, or Zustand is a plus.
• You've built libraries, SDKs, or developer tools that other engineers depend on, and you understand the difference between shipping an application and shipping a toolkit other people build on.
• Experience working at a product or SaaS company as a engineering manager or senior engineer.
• Experience working closely with product managers and designers to deliver for both technical and non-technical users.
• Comfortable working with remote and distributed teams.
• You communicate technical designs clearly and concisely, in writing and out loud.
• Pragmatic. You care about getting it right, and you care more about not blocking the people who depend on you.
• You care about the people you work with and have real empathy for the developers using what your team builds.
• What sets you apart
• You've maintained a meaningful open-source project and have opinions about what makes a good one.
• Experience with API or SDK design at a developer platform company.
• A strong point of view on how AI-assisted development changes what a good SDK looks like.
• Experience with automated browser testing and Node.js.
• Startup experience.
• Not sure you're exactly what we're looking for in this role? Apply anyway!
• What we can offer
• A highly-skilled, inspiring, and supportive team
• Positive, flexible, and trust-based work environment that encourages long-term professional and personal growth
• A global, multi-culturally diverse group of colleagues and customers
• Comprehensive health plans and perks
• A healthy work-life balance that accommodates individual and family needs
• Competitive salary and stock options program
• Who we are
• Sanity.io is a modern, flexible content operating system that replaces rigid legacy content management systems. One of our big differentiators is treating content as data so that it can be stored in a single source of truth, but seamlessly adapted and personalized for any channel without extra effort. Forward-thinking companies choose Sanity because they can create tailored content authoring experiences, customized workflows, and content models that reflect their business.
• Sanity recently raised an $85m Series C led by GP Bullhound and is also backed by leading investors like ICONIQ Growth, Threshold Ventures, Heavybit and Shopify, as well as founders of companies like Vercel, WPEngine, Twitter, Mux, Netlify and Heroku. This funding round has put Sanity in a strong position for accelerated growth in the coming years.
• You can only build a great company with a great culture. Sanity is a 200+ person company with highly committed and ambitious people. We are pioneers , we exist for our customers , we are hel ved , and we love type two fun ! Read more about our values here !
• Sanity.io pledges to be an organization that reflects the globally diverse audience that our product serves. We believe that in addition to hiring the best talent, a diversity of perspectives, ideas, and cultures leads to the creation of better products and services. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or gender identity.