Senior Engineering Manager (AI Product, Thunderbolt)

Role overview

Senior Engineering Manager for Thunderbolt, an open-source AI product initiative within MZLA (Thunderbird). You’ll lead engineering execution and people management, stay deeply engaged with the codebase, and help deliver a reliable, enterprise-ready AI product.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering execution by clarifying priorities, ownership, timelines, risks, dependencies, and quality expectations
• Manage engineers and contractors: coaching, feedback, prioritization, performance support, and team development
• Stay close to the codebase: contribute code, review technical work, evaluate tradeoffs, and maintain delivery momentum

Requirements

• 15+ years professional software development experience, including senior engineering leadership or complex product delivery
• 5+ years experience managing technical teams (senior engineers or senior individual contributors)
• Demonstrated delivery of complex applications across desktop/web/mobile using technologies such as Tauri, Electron, React Native, or similar frameworks
• Proven record shipping polished, top-tier products with high standards of craft
• Technical fluency with AI-enabled products, including evaluating tradeoffs across areas such as LLM applications, RAG, agents, enterprise search, automation, on-device AI, and AI evaluation
• Ability to translate ambiguous product/technical direction into clear plans, ownership models, and execution momentum
• Strong communication skills around prioritization, release risk, ownership, quality, and tradeoffs
• Experience in enterprise/regulatory environments (security, privacy, compliance readiness, administration, integrations, customer-controlled deployment)
• Practical experience with local-first / offline-capable / self-hosted / hybrid / on-premise / air-gapped architectures and related tradeoffs (data storage, sync, privacy, reliability, UX)
• Experience improving engineering practices (planning, code review, release readiness, testing, documentation, CI/CD, maintainability, technical debt)
• Familiarity with security/compliance standards such as SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, or similar
• Experience taking a product from zero to one in a startup or new initiative
• Experience working in open-source / maintainer-style environments

Nice-to-haves

• Experience helping with technical planning and release management across time zones and disciplines
• Experience with customer-controlled deployment models in regulated contexts

Location

• Full remote; must reside in and have permanent work authorization for the country location(s) specified in the posting (New York, US).