[Hiring] Senior Engineering Manager @FirstPrinciples

Role Description

We are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team of four to six engineers building core capabilities for Theo and our scientific research platform.

• Manage, coach, and develop a team of four to six engineers.
• Form and lead multidisciplinary squads around clear scientific and product outcomes.
• Translate open-ended research goals into technical strategies, milestones, and well-designed systems.
• Partner closely with researchers and physicists from early exploration through implementation and production.
• Create effective paths for researchers to contribute prototypes, algorithms, evaluations, and domain-specific code alongside engineers.
• Help experimental systems mature without losing the ideas and assumptions that made them scientifically valuable.
• Guide architecture, interfaces, technical standards, and major implementation decisions.
• Establish clear ownership and decision-making across teams and reporting lines.
• Balance research velocity with reliability, maintainability, reproducibility, security, and cost.
• Build strong practices for testing, evaluation, observability, documentation, deployment, and operational ownership.
• Stay close enough to the work to review designs, diagnose difficult problems, and contribute directly when it has high leverage.
• Influence engineering strategy, hiring, organizational design, and technical culture beyond your immediate team.

Qualifications

• Significant software engineering experience building complex systems.
• Experience managing and developing high-performing engineers, with a demonstrated ability to raise the velocity and accountability of engineering teams in a sustainable fashion.
• A bias for action and iterative delivery, while maintaining high technical standards.
• Strong technical judgement across architecture, implementation, and production operations.
• Strong execution judgement of knowing when to explore, when to decide, when to simplify, and when to push a team toward completion.
• Experience leading cross-functional or matrixed teams without relying on direct authority.
• A record of turning ambiguous ideas or prototypes into dependable capabilities.
• The ability to build trust and shared language across engineering and research disciplines.
• Scientific curiosity and the technical humility to learn from deep domain experts.
• Strong communication, facilitation, and conflict-resolution skills.
• A pragmatic, low-ego leadership style grounded in evidence and clear reasoning.
• Comfort operating where the problem, solution, and path to delivery may all be uncertain.

Requirements

• Particularly Relevant Experience:
• AI, machine learning, agentic systems, simulation, scientific computing, or research infrastructure.
• Model engineering, applications, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, or developer platforms.
• Moving research prototypes into scalable, maintainable products.
• Designing systems where evaluation, provenance, reproducibility, or scientific validity matter.
• Working with physicists, mathematicians, or other research-intensive teams.
• Leading remote and globally distributed teams.

Benefits

• You will help define how engineers, AI researchers, and physicists work together to build a new kind of scientific instrument—one capable of contributing to humanity’s understanding of the universe.

Please submit a resume and cover letter describing your leadership experience, technical background, and interest in our mission. Include “Senior Engineering Manager” in your cover letter.