Engineering Manager - Fullstack

You will lead a team of 4-6 engineers spanning our SaaS product and Voice AI platform. This is a working manager role, not a pure people manager, and not a hands-off strategist. You are expected to hold three responsibilities in parallel, and we have designed the role split honestly so you can plan for it: 40% technical leadership. Architecture reviews, design decisions, quality standards, release discipline, cross-cutting technical strategy. 30% people leadership. 1:1s, career growth, hiring, calibration, handling the hard conversations, protecting focus time. 30% direct code. You still commit. Not on the critical path of every sprint, but on the sharp problem spikes, tricky integrations, unblocking, prototypes. You should want all three. If you are looking to fully step out of code, this is not the right role. If you want to build an engineering org from an early stage and still have your hands in the system, it is.
Responsibilities:
Own delivery for your team. Break down initiatives, sequence work, remove blockers, ship on committed dates without burning the team out.
Set the technical bar. Drive code review culture, define standards for quality, testing, observability, and on-call. Enforce them by example, not memos.
Grow the people. Run meaningful 1:1s, give clear feedback, define growth paths, and coach engineers into stronger versions of themselves.
Contribute technically. Design and review architecture across our stack: web, backend services, AI/voice integrations. Write code where it matters most.
Partner with the CTO. Translate product and business direction into technical plans. Surface trade-offs early, own the follow-through.
Build the operating rhythm. Sprint planning, retros, incident reviews, release cadence not as ceremony, but as the system that keeps a small team scaling.
Requirements:
5-6+ years of engineering experience, with at least the last 1-2 years in a lead, tech lead, or engineering manager capacity.
Programming ability is mandatory; you are a working manager, not a proxy. Strong depth in at least two of Node.js, Python, or React; comfortable enough in the third to review and unblock.
Sound systems judgment: you can look at a design, spot the load-bearing assumptions, and call out what will fail before it does.
Direct experience running 1:1s and giving performance feedback.
Comfortable owning delivery to committed dates, and communicating trade-offs honestly when reality moves the target.
Ability to work across two product surfaces (SaaS and Voice AI) without needing to specialise in either from day one, with enough range to hold context on both.
Good to have:
Working knowledge of Go; we use it in parts of the stack, and it is a plus, not a filter.
Experience with real-time or voice systems (WebRTC, streaming pipelines, LLM/ASR/TTS integration).
Prior experience in a small startup engineering team as a founding engineer, early lead, or first EM role in a growing company.
Track record of hiring engineers who later grew into leaders themselves.
Experience with observability, on-call, and incident review at a serious level.
Mandatory skills: Node.js, Python, or React (WebRTC, streaming pipelines, LLM/ASR/TTS integration).

Experience
5-8 yrs