Senior Engineering Manager

We’re an early-stage startup building for retail traders. We move fast, ship often, and obsess over customer outcomes. We’re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager who can lead a small, high-ownership team, roll up their sleeves to build, and translate product intent into crisp engineering execution, without over-engineering for a million users on day one, but ensuring we’re solid for 10K users in the short term.

What you’ll do

• Lead and grow a team of engineers in an early-stage environment (hiring, coaching, feedback, performance).
• Drive execution with a strong bias to action: break ambiguous problems into milestones, ship iteratively, and unblock quickly.
• Stay hands-on: review code, contribute when needed, help with architecture decisions, and jump into implementation during critical phases.
• Partner deeply with founders/product to translate customer needs into clear technical requirements and prioritization.
• Build pragmatic systems that are reliable and maintainable for the next stage.
• Own delivery outcomes: quality, timelines, operational readiness, and continuous improvement.
• Establish lightweight engineering processes (sprint rituals, tech planning, incident hygiene, PR/review culture) appropriate for a small team, no bureaucracy.
• Champion good engineering practices: testing strategy, observability, security basics, and clean documentation.

What we’re looking for

• Experience leading engineers at an early-stage startup (or similarly fast-paced, high-ambiguity environment).
• High bias toward action and ownership: you make progress daily, not just plans.
• Hands-on engineering depth: you’ve built and shipped real systems and can still contribute meaningfully in code and architecture.
• Product lens: you can understand customer problems, simplify requirements, and communicate “why this matters” to engineers.
• Strong communication: clear written specs, decisive trade-offs, and alignment across stakeholders.
• Pragmatic scalability mindset: you avoid premature complexity but build with sound fundamentals so the platform doesn’t collapse as usage grows.
• Founder experience or meaningful startup leadership (0→1, team building, shipping under constraints).
• Exposure to trading/fintech, market data, or real-time systems (helpful, not required).

For an ideal candidate, success looks like building and enabling a small team that ships consistently with high ownership, where product requirements translate into clear technical plans and delivery becomes predictably repeatable. The core services should be stable, observable, and genuinely production-grade, while you establish an engineering culture that balances speed with quality, pragmatic design, clean code, and fast iteration without unnecessary process.