Engineering Manager

The Opportunity

We are looking for an Engineering Manager/Team Lead to join our engineering team. This is a critical role for an experienced, hands-on team lead with a broad and deep skillset across multiple languages such as Go, Python and Java and strong experience building and scaling distributed systems in cloud environments such as AWS or Google Cloud.

As a Team Lead, you will help get the best out of your team by ensuring they are focused, priorities are clear and technical decisions designed, discussed and unblocked as needed. You will ensure your team is following best practices in SDLC and perform regular code reviews to ensure a high bar for quality is being achieved. While the primary focus of this role is ensuring the team's success, you will also be hands on and able to work with the team on resolving issues and implementing features. 

This is a unique opportunity to join an early-stage company led by serial entrepreneur Andrew Filev (founder of a unicorn startup), and shape a product that is redefining how software is built.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of backend engineers, guiding design, development, and delivery of high-quality software solutions.
• Drive the design and implementation of features, ensuring best practices and collaboration with Staff Engineers and Tech Leads in appropriate areas.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, frontend teams, DevOps, and QA to align on requirements, roadmaps, and release plans.
• Establish best practices for code quality, testing, CI/CD pipelines, and incident response and influence within your team across the organization.
• Hire, onboard and mentor your team into a high performing group.
• Identify and tackle technical debt, propose refactoring initiatives, and continuously evolve system architecture.
• Monitor system health in production, lead post-mortems and propose improvements for areas your team owns.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years as a team lead or engineering manager.
• Strong proficiency in at least one of the following languages: Python, Java/Kotlin and Go with working proficiency in at least two. 
• Hands-on experience with distributed system patterns (microservices, event-driven architectures).
• Demonstrated ability to hire, onboard, and develop engineers; foster career growth through coaching and regular feedback.
• Experience planning and prioritizing work for a small team, balancing feature delivery with technical maintenance.
• Excellent communicator—able to translate technical concepts into clear plans and share status with stakeholders.
• Hands-on mindset: comfortable diving into code for troubleshooting, reviews, and mentoring.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines.
• Curiosity, pragmatism, and a willingness to challenge assumptions.

Why Join Zencoder?

• Impact: Gen AI will change how companies develop software in the next two years. Be at the frontier of that AI work, building a category-leading product in a huge market. You will have an everyday opportunity to innovate.
• Growth potential: Thrive in a high-growth AI startup combining personal and career growth.
• High Talent Density: Collaborate daily with our experienced AI engineers, software engineers, and founder, Andrew Filev.
• Equity: Align your success with ours by participating in our equity plan.
• Flexibility: We hire globally, prioritizing talent over location. Work where you’re most productive and comfortable.