Role Description
As a Mason Manager (Engineering Manager), you will lead multiple pods of Junior + Senior Masons responsible for building and shipping production automation and agentic systems for customers. This is a highly technical people leadership role. You will be accountable for what your pods ship: architecture decisions, quality bars, reliability, documentation, and delivery outcomes. Youβll also invest heavily in hiring, coaching, and performance management β building a team that can deliver at scale with consistent craft. You are not a βprocess-onlyβ manager. You will stay close to the work: reviewing designs, unblocking complex integrations, setting engineering standards, and acting as the escalation point for production issues and delivery risk.
Responsibilities
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Lead multiple Mason pods and own delivery outcomes: scope, milestones, quality, and on-time execution
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Translate ambiguous customer/internal requests into clear plans, acceptance criteria, and execution strategy
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Set and enforce production-quality standards for Mason builds (testing, monitoring, runbooks, documentation, rollout plans)
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Serve as technical escalation for difficult problems: auth/permissions, integrations, data modeling, reliability, and failure recovery
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Establish and evolve team processes: scoping discipline, QA gates, review checklists, incident/postmortem loops, and continuous improvement
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Drive prioritization and capacity planning across pods; identify the critical path and remove blockers fast
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Partner with Delivery Leads and stakeholders to manage tradeoffs, timelines, and expectations (including client-facing escalations when needed)
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Hire and build the team: define roles, run interview loops, calibrate, close candidates, and improve onboarding
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Manage performance: set expectations, deliver feedback, coach growth, and handle underperformance clearly and fairly
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Develop leaders within the Mason org: mentoring, delegation, and building strong ownership at every level
Qualifications
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5+ years of experience building production systems as a software/automation engineer
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2+ years of engineering management or tech-leadership experience (people management strongly preferred)
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Experience managing multiple concurrent workstreams (pods/squads) with shared standards and predictable delivery
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Deep comfort with integrations: APIs, webhooks, auth (OAuth/API keys), and data stores (Postgres/Supabase)
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Ability to reason about reliability in automation/agentic systems: idempotency, retries/backoff, rate limits, auditing, and safe failure modes
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Strong quality mindset: unit/integration/E2E testing, regression prevention, monitoring/observability, and runbook culture
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Experience with applied AI delivery patterns: prompt iteration, eval harnesses, human-in-the-loop QA, and LLM observability
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Enjoyment of people management with real examples of coaching, feedback, and performance management
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Experience running hiring loops end-to-end: defining roles, interviewing, calibration, and closing candidates
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Clear and fluent communication in English β written and verbal β with the ability to align technical and non-technical stakeholders
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Ability to thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and take ownership without being asked
What Success Looks Like
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Multiple Mason pods ship production AI Employees predictably, with clear milestones and minimal thrash
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Builds are reliable in the wild: fewer incidents, fast recovery, strong observability, and durable runbooks/SOPs
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Engineering standards are consistently applied across pods (testing, documentation, QA gates, and design clarity)
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Stakeholders have high trust: timelines and tradeoffs are communicated early and crisply
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The Mason org scales through strong hiring and onboarding; new Masons ramp quickly and ship meaningful work
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Team performance improves over time through coaching, clear expectations, and a high-accountability culture