[Hiring] Engineering Manager @Dispel

Role Description

Dispel builds network isolation and access infrastructure for critical industries, where a breach is an operational failure with real-world consequences. The Senior Engineering Manager is accountable for making that standard real. This is a people-first, delivery-focused leadership role. You will manage 6–12 engineers across one or two teams, owning the full management lifecycle:

• Hiring
• Onboarding
• Career development
• Performance management
• Hard conversations

As a direct report to the VP of Engineering, you will also co-own how engineering works at Dispel, participating in decisions about:

• Org structure
• Engineering-wide practices
• Multi-quarter delivery strategy

Technical judgment is non-negotiable. You will read pull requests, join architecture discussions, and flag technical risk. You must understand what your teams are building to fully enable them.

Execution

• Own delivery health across all active work: track project status, identify blockers early, remove obstacles, and escalate risks to the VP of Engineering with context and a proposed path forward.
• Run effective team rituals (sprint planning, retrospectives, standups, reviews) calibrated to what your teams actually need, not a fixed process template.
• Conduct regular, substantive 1:1s with every direct report. Maintain a clear picture of each engineer's performance, goals, and career trajectory.
• Own performance management end to end: develop high performers, address underperformance directly, and document both with the specificity needed to make decisions.
• Participate in hiring loops: source candidates, conduct interviews, calibrate against the hiring bar, and contribute to offer decisions with a defensible rationale.
• Contribute to quarterly and multi-quarter planning by translating roadmap intentions into realistic capacity models, surfacing dependencies, and flagging sequencing risks.
• Maintain sufficient technical context to evaluate your teams' work. This includes reading pull requests for signal, joining architecture discussions, and escalating technical concerns.
• Drive accountability for quality standards: code review practices, test coverage, documentation discipline, and incident response follow-through.
• Partner with product and project managers to align on priorities, negotiate scope, and represent your teams' capacity honestly.

Enabling Others

• Participate in an on-call rotation to support system reliability, including responding to incidents and performing after-hours troubleshooting as needed.
• Partner with other Engineering managers and VP of Engineering on team structure, headcount planning, career leveling consistency, and the definition of what good looks like at each IC level.
• Identify patterns across your teams (recurring process failures, tooling friction, onboarding gaps) and drive improvements that benefit engineering beyond your teams.
• Refine Dispel's hiring practices: help define the hiring bar, improve interview formats, and calibrate debriefs so decisions are consistent and defensible.
• Advocate for investments your teams need: better release pipelines, CI/CD improvements, developer tooling. Make the case to the VP with specifics about impact and cost.
• Represent engineering credibly to non-engineering stakeholders. Translate technical constraints into language that informs business decisions without oversimplifying.
• Model the culture you want to see: intellectual honesty, directness, follow-through, and genuine care for your people.

Qualifications

• 4 or more years managing software engineering teams of 5+ ICs in a product engineering environment.
• A prior career as a software engineer with enough depth to understand what good engineering looks like.
• Comfortable using coding agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) as part of your daily workflow.
• Demonstrated track record of growing engineers' careers.
• Experience with multi-quarter planning.
• Strong technical judgment.
• Experience managing engineers on security-critical, reliability-critical, or infrastructure-adjacent software.
• Demonstrated ability to operate remote-first.
• Strong written communication.
• US work authorization required.

Bonus Points

• Experience at a company with a security-first product or customers in regulated industries.
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, FedRAMP, or IEC 62443.
• Exposure to Dispel's core technology areas.
• Experience driving improvements to release infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, or developer tooling.
• Prior experience working alongside a Technical Program Manager or equivalent.
• Familiarity with structured hiring and leveling practices.
• A willingness to accept failure and feedback, learn and try again.
• A passion for learning new disciplines and gaining a deep understanding of how others on the team do their work.
• An ability to communicate clearly and succinctly both in-person and over team chat.

Benefits

• Base salary: $165,000-189,000
• 401(k) with company match
• Generous paid time off and holidays
• Performance bonus and equity eligible
• Remote work
• Medical, vision, dental insurance