[Hiring] Engineering Manager @Nametag

Role Description

We're looking for an engineering leader to own how Nametag's engineering team works — how it plans, ships, operates, and grows. This is a player-coach role on a small, senior team. You'll manage a group of staff- and senior-level engineers working across a Go backend on AWS, a React/TypeScript frontend, native mobile clients, and the ML systems behind our fraud detection.

• You will not be writing most of the code, but you need to be able to read it, review it, and hold a credible opinion in a design discussion.
• Engineers here are experienced and autonomous; they want a manager who removes obstacles and raises the bar, not one who assigns tickets.
• You'll own delivery end to end: what the team commits to, whether it lands, and what we learn when it doesn't.
• You'll partner closely with product and with the CEO on roadmap and tradeoffs, and you'll be accountable for the operational health of a platform that enterprises depend on for account security.
• Reliability, incident response, and secure-by-default engineering are part of how the team ships.
• You'll be expected to have a point of view on how a team should actually work in an AI-native engineering environment.

What you’ll do

• Lead the team:
  • Manage, coach, and grow a team of senior and staff engineers, including regular 1:1s, feedback, and performance and promotion decisions.
  • Set expectations clearly and address problems early. Protect the team's focus and its standards with equal energy.
  • Grow people deliberately — career paths, stretch work, and the honest conversations that make either one meaningful.
• Own delivery:
  • Run planning and execution so the team ships predictably: clear scope, visible progress, and no surprises at the end of a quarter.
  • Make and communicate tradeoffs between speed, quality, and scope, and be accountable for the call.
  • Unblock work. Escalate the things that need escalating and absorb the rest.
• Own operational health:
  • Be accountable for reliability, on-call, and incident response for the systems your team owns.
  • Drive postmortems that change something. Treat a repeat incident as a process failure, not bad luck.
  • Keep security and compliance obligations as part of normal engineering work rather than an annual scramble.
• Partner across the company:
  • Work with product and design to turn a roadmap into a sequenced, buildable plan.
  • Represent engineering to customers, prospects, and the exec team, including in the technical conversations that close enterprise deals.
  • Translate between what customers need and what the architecture will actually support.
• Hire and build the org:
  • Own engineering hiring: sourcing, interview design, calibration, and closing.
  • Raise the quality of the bar and the fairness of the process at the same time.
  • Design team structure and ownership boundaries as the org grows.
• Shape how the team engineers:
  • Set and enforce the standards — code review, testing, deployment, documentation, architectural decision records.
  • Define how the team uses AI tooling responsibly.
  • Make the build, test, and deploy path something engineers trust.

Qualifications

• Work authorization required: Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States for any employer without current or future need for visa sponsorship.
• You do not need to match every bullet. We care most about judgment, ownership, and evidence that teams get better under your leadership.
• Minimum Qualifications:
  • 3+ years managing software engineers, including senior and staff-level ICs, with a track record of shipping production systems.
  • A strong engineering background of your own — you've built and operated backend or distributed systems at scale.
  • Experience owning delivery for a team: planning, prioritization, and accountability for outcomes rather than activity.
  • Experience running on-call and incident response for a production system with real availability expectations.
  • Demonstrated hiring success — you've built an interview process, not just sat on panels.
  • Comfort operating at startup scope: ambiguous problems, shifting priorities, and no one else to hand the hard thing to.
  • Strong written communication. We're remote-first, and decisions that aren't written down didn't happen.

Bonus Points

• Experience in security, identity, fraud, or infrastructure-adjacent B2B SaaS.
• Experience with Go, AWS, and a services architecture.
• Experience scaling an engineering org through a growth stage — adding teams, layers, or a second manager.
• Experience with SOC 2 or similar compliance regimes as an engineering leader rather than a bystander.
• A real point of view, informed by practice, on how AI coding tools change engineering process and quality.

What we value

• High ownership. You see what needs doing and do it.
• Technical judgment. You make systems simpler, safer, and easier to operate.
• Speed with care. We move quickly because attackers move quickly, but we do not cut corners on trust or security.
• Knowledge compounds. What one person learns should be available to everyone, and to the tools we work alongside.
• Kindness and integrity. Trust starts with how we work with each other.

Culture & Perks

• Remote-first: Work from anywhere in the US.
• Off-sites: We bring the team together once per quarter for in-person collaboration.
• Flexible schedules: Work in your own time zone; we align key meetings across a shared window.

We Offer

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful equity ownership
• Comprehensive health benefits (medical, dental, vision)
• Flexible paid time off
• Quarterly team off-sites and travel support
• New computer hardware and equipment
• An inclusive environment where your voice has impact and your work drives change