[Hiring] Engineering Manager @Workato

Role Description

We are looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead a team building core internal infrastructure and developer-facing systems. This role sits at the intersection of project management, engineering leadership, and platform development. The team (Evaluation Engines / Data processing engines) owns foundational components which are embedded into higher level workflow engines and tools. Examples are formula evaluation, data transformation according to predefined mapping, decision models, etc.

The team is technically strong and highly autonomous. We are looking for an Engineering Manager who can operate effectively in this environment: someone with a strong engineering background who understands complex systems, but does not need to be the deepest technical expert in every area.

Your role will be to help experienced engineers work effectively together, create clarity across interconnected initiatives, and improve how the team plans, collaborates, and delivers.

What You’ll Do

• Lead a strong engineering team:
  • Manage and develop experienced engineers with significant ownership of their technical domains.
  • The team is mostly Rust engineers, but also builds libraries for several other programming languages: Go, Ruby, Java, Python, and WASM.
  • Responsible for regular 1:1s, feedback, performance management, career development, hiring, onboarding, and team health.
  • Create an environment where engineers can remain highly autonomous while having clear priorities, ownership, and accountability.
  • Responsible for team capacity planning and hiring when needed.
• Build strong product:
  • Work closely with Product Managers and department VP to define product features and priorities.
  • Responsible for working with Quality Engineering and Product Security teams to deliver high-quality products.
  • Embrace new tools to shift quality and security scans left.
• Drive planning and execution:
  • Own planning and operational execution across multiple engineering workstreams.
  • Create visibility into priorities, dependencies, timelines, and resource allocation.
  • Help the team turn broad technical direction into an executable roadmap.
  • Identify and remove blockers before they significantly impact delivery.
  • Balance new development, customer commitments, operational work, and technical debt.
  • Define meaningful engineering metrics and use them to identify opportunities for improvement.
  • Keep stakeholders informed about progress, risks, and trade-offs.
  • Plan release and update cycles of the product.
  • Maintain the product, be responsible for defects triaging and mitigation.
• Stay close to technology:
  • This is not a purely people-management role; a technical background and experience is a must.
  • Comfortable participating in technical discussions, reviewing designs and architecture proposals, and understanding engineering trade-offs.
  • May review code, contribute to tooling or prototypes, participate in incident investigation, or use automation and AI-assisted development to improve engineering workflows.
  • Senior engineers will own significant parts of the technical direction, enabling them to do that effectively is key.

Qualifications

• Significant software engineering experience before or alongside engineering management.
• Experience managing senior, autonomous engineers.
• A strong background in platform engineering, developer infrastructure, developer productivity, backend infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• Experience with CI/CD, release engineering, developer tooling, or internal engineering platforms.
• Experience owning roadmaps and delivering multi-quarter engineering initiatives.
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycle and engineering practices.
• Experience managing technical debt alongside product and business priorities.
• Ability to understand complex technical discussions without needing to personally own every implementation decision.
• Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional communication skills.
• Experience hiring, coaching, and developing engineers.
• A pragmatic approach to engineering processes: enough structure to make teams effective, without unnecessary bureaucracy.

What Makes Someone Successful in This Role

• Comfortable joining a team where engineers may understand individual systems more deeply than you do.
• Ask the right questions, understand trade-offs, create clarity, and help engineers make good decisions together.
• Enjoy finding problems in the engineering system itself: unclear ownership, slow reviews, hidden dependencies, fragmented tooling, competing priorities, or processes that depend too heavily on individuals pushing things forward.
• Move between conversations about architecture or CI pipelines, a 1:1 with an engineer, roadmap prioritization with Product, and discussions about delivery timelines.
• Align team roadmap with requirements from Product Managers and Engineering leadership.
• Combine technical credibility with strong people and execution leadership.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Golang or Rust; understanding of WASM platform.
• Basic understanding of formal grammar, AST, compiler frontends.
• Observability and operational tooling.
• Open-source development.
• AI-assisted software development and automated code review.
• PostgreSQL or database infrastructure.
• Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, or cloud infrastructure.
• Multi-repository development environments.
• Developer-facing APIs, SDKs, libraries, or integrations.